Professor Emeric Deutsch (retired) of the Mathematics department was one of four invited speakers at the 2008 GASCOM (Génération Aléatoire et exhaustive de Structures Combinatoires) conference June 16 - 19 in Bibbiena (Tuscany).
His talk was titled “Deco polyominoes.” The conference topic was “the random and exhaustive generation of combinatorial objects and bijective combinatorics with focus on the theoretical point of view.”
Residence assistants cutback on paper waste by creating this recycle-inspired, paperless bulletin board.Did you know that recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours?
Students living in the Othmer Residence Hall have been learning similar energy-related facts every day this spring since the Office of Residence Life, with support from the Facilities Department, began the pilot green initiative R.E.D.O. (Reduction, Education, Do Research and Outreach).
Daniel Aniello, Director of Residence Life and member of Poly’s Sustainable Practices Committee, created R.E.D.O. as a way “to develop Residence Life into a green community and to use its success as an example of sustainability for the rest of the campus.” Read More
“Inferring Network-Wide Quality in P2P Live Streaming Systems,” by Professors Yong Liu (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Keith Ross (Computer and Information Sciences) and CIS Post Doctoral Fellow Xiaojun Hei has been recognized as the 2008 Best Paper in Multimedia Communications by the IEEE Communications Society.
The paper, published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, December 2007, proposes an innovative method to remotely monitor the network-wide video playback quality in peer-to-peer live video streaming systems. The method was applied to study the performance of one of the largest P2P live video streaming systems on the Internet. Read the award-winning paper, “Inferring Network-Wide Quality in P2P Live Streaming Systems.”
The article “Harnessing Biology, and Avoiding Oil, for Chemical Goods” invites readers to balk not just at the price at the pump, but at the vastness of products subject to the every-growing cost of petroleum.
“More than a tenth of the world’s oil is spent not on powering engines but as a feedstock for making chemicals that enrich many goods - from cosmetics to cleaners and fabric to automobile parts,” writes Yudhijit Bhattacharjee.
Our own Richard Gross weighs in:
As petroleum prices go up and climate change becomes a serious concern, the economy will have no choice but to switch to a chemical base derived from plant materials, said Dr. Richard Gross, director of the Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing of Macromolecules at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn.
Read “Harnessing Biology, and Avoiding Oil, for Chemical Goods” in full.
President Jerry M. Hultin was a panelist at a recent two-day conference at the University at Albany that examined universities’ role in economic development.
Eric Anderson’s coverage of the conference for the Union Times begins by stating that “The state’s colleges and universities say they’re more than willing to help local businesses grow and thrive. In fact, they may be the best hope New York has.”
Anderson’s coverage includes this about President Hultin and Poly’s efforts to create a fertile ground for entrepreneurship:
Universities are working with their own students to encourage entrepreneurship. Jerry Hultin, president of Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, told of weekend “invent a company” events that students competed in, and how students work with startups at the school’s incubator.
Read the complete article, “Business, campus ventures urged“
Professor Nasir Memon says it isn’t cryptography’s fault that we worry about Internet security. How are we able to shop online securely? That’s the question of an article on Scienceline.com featuring the expertise of Professor Nasir Memon, Director of Poly’s Information Systems and Internet Security Lab.
There’s a three-word answer to the question: public key cryptography. This “allows anyone to scramble a message (like credit card information) to an intended party, but it lets only that party unscramble it.” As the article points out though, “If this kind of cryptography is so great, why are we still worried about Internet security?” Nasir explains why in this excerpt from the article by Rachel Mahan:
It isn’t cryptography’s fault, says Nasir Memon, a computer science professor and director of Polytechnic University’s Information Systems and Internet Security Lab in Brooklyn.
Memon says it’s like we have nice locks on a cardboard house. He maintains that problems can occur if our information isn’t stored securely once it gets to its destination, if the technology isn’t applied properly or even if we don’t know how to protect ourselves.
Although public key cryptography isn’t the whole story of online security, it is an important component.
Here’s how Memon describes encryption and decryption: Say a professor has 30 students who want to communicate privately with him. He can put up 30 mailboxes outside his office, each locked with a combination for each student, but then he has to remember 30 combinations. This is called private key cryptography — both sides know and agree on a way to encrypt and decrypt the message.
Instead, he could leave a box of unlocked locks next to the open mailboxes. All of these locks require the same combination. This way, every student can lock up a secure message, but the professor is still the only one who can open any of them, and he has only one combination to remember. This is public key cryptography — anyone can encrypt the message to a recipient, but only the recipient can decrypt it.
Panelist Bud Griffis says, “What we need is a new transit system.” Bud Griffis, Director of Poly’s Center for Construction Management, was a panelist at a recent conference at Iona College to discuss the nation’s infrastructure. The impetus for the conference was the sudden collapse of a Minneapolis bridge in August 2007 that killed 13 people.
Rob Varnon of the Connecticut Post reported on the conference. His article “Panelists map out infrastructure ideas” includes some of Bud’s comments. Below is an excerpt.
Panelist Bud Griffis said it is vital to deal with [infrastructure] issues on more than one front, especially on energy.
“You’re going to look back and say ‘I remember when I paid $10 a gallon for gasoline,’ ” said Griffis, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and director of Polytechnic University’s Center for Construction Management. Because oil is a finite commodity, the price will continue to rise, so the U.S. needs to find a new source of energy, he said.
Some at the conference suggested building new nuclear power plants.
Griffis pointed out problems and made a suggestion.
“What we need is a new transit system,” he said. He proposed creating a high-speed regional train system to eliminate congestion at airports.
TechieCrossing, a leading online source for tech jobs, news, and industry trends, recently profiled Andres Fortino, Associate Provost and Dean of Poly’s Westchester campus, in an article called “Teaching Excellence in Technology” by Akbar Ali.
Excerpts from the article:
- Fortino’s interest in technology began not with a desire to be a part of the modern era’s digital revolution, but with his desire to fully utilize the main purpose of technology: to make communication and daily functions simpler and more accessible for users.
- “I am fundamentally an engineer. I love to create new things, build things, and solve problems - but with a purpose, something that is of use or which serves a useful purpose. [This is] different from a scientist that asks why the universe works the way it does - I ask how I can make it work.”
- “I was [at IBM] at the birth of the first PC, saw the world of data networking grow up, and debated the protocols needed to power the Internet. My job was [working] as an ion implanter. We accelerated atoms of boron, phosphorus, and arsenic with electric fields, separated them with magnetic fields, and slammed them into silicon wafers.”
- While at Polytechnic, Fortino has done more than serve as dean: he has spent the last semester developing a radio show with local CIOs, including Alcatel, FUJIFILM, IBM, and the USTA. This program is designed to make students and parents aware of the possibilities and opportunities waiting for those who pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Jonathan Soffer, Associate Professor of History, has given two invited talks. On January 15, he addressed a history department seminar at the University of Delhi in Delhi, India. His talk was titled “Scheming for Freedom, Fun, Profit, Justice or Empire: American Machiavellianism in the Progressive Era.” On October 30, he spoke at Columbia University to the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Working Group in African-American History and the Health and Social Sciences about the 1980 Hospital Closing Controversy.
Dr. Andres Fortino, Westchester Associate Provost and Dean, was recently quoted in “Skills Assessments for IT Workers,” an article featured on CIO Strategy Center.com
Dr. Fortino commented on why it’s important to measure an IT employee’s skills after he/she is hired:
- For promotion… “Skills assessments give people a visual path toward career advancement, and that helps with retention, notes Andres Fortino,” associate provost at Polytechnic University in New York.
- To create a stronger, more flexible work force… “If an organization has loose definitions as to who’s a programmer and who’s an analyst, there will be some people in some part of the shop who have the title but are not as skilled as others,” Fortino explains. “With declared competencies for each position, the organization can align for evenness. And it can avoid moving staff into jobs they can’t do.”
Read the entire “Skills Assessments for IT Workers” article by By Minda Zetlin