Seminars, Workshops and Conferences
May 28, 2003: General Motors (GM) in ASEAN special seminar, co-organized by SOM, GM and the Asian Wall Street Journal, will be held at 1:30 p.m. in the School of Management Ampitheatre.
Mr. William S. Botwick, Executive Director of ASEAN, General Motors (GM) Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. and President and Managing Director of General Motors (Thailand) Ltd. will conduct the seminar and will focus on GM and its branding strategy and automotive business in ASEAN.
Interested persons are welcome.
About the speaker:
Mr. William S. Botwick, President of GM Thailand and Chevrolet Sales Thailand, was appointed as Executive Director of ASEAN, General Motors Asia Pacific and President & Managing Director for General Motors Thailand on June 27, 2001. The GM ASEAN operation headquarters is located in Thailand.
In these roles, he oversees all areas of GM operations in the ASEAN, including the advanced manufacturing operations at the GM Thailand Assembly Center in Rayong Province, export and domestic sales, marketing, and after-sales service, as well as operations in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore
Mr. Botwick was named President of General Motors Thailand in August 1999. Prior to that assignment, he was a President Director of General Motors Indonesia from July 1995 until July 1999. While in Jakarta, he also served as the First Vice President of the American Chamber in Indonesia. From 1990-1995 he was Managing Director of General Motors Taiwan in Taipei and was also active in the American Chamber of Commerce, serving as its President from 1993-1994. At present, he serves as Vice President of American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand from beginning of 2001.
From 1984 - 1990, Mr. Botwick served as the Assistant General Counsel for General Motors Corporation in Detroit, Michigan. In 1982-1984, he served as the Assistant General Counsel for GM in Ruesselsheim, Germany. And from 1979-1982, he was the Director of Legal Affairs for Southern Europe for GM in Madrid, Spain. He began his career at General Motors in 1971 in the Legal Department in Detroit, Michigan.
Mr. Botwick was born on June 26, 1946, in Paterson, New Jersey, USA. He holds a Bachelor's degree in English literature from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, USA and a Law degree (J.D. Cum Laude) from the Boston University of Law, Massachusetts, USA.
May 29, 2003: The School of Civil Engineering will be presenting a seminar on 'The Private Provision of Public Transport.' The seminar will be conducted by Dr. Jonathan E. D. Richmond at 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. at the Milton Bender Auditorium, ITServ Building.
Interested persons are welcome.
Abstract
With an increasing focus on the potentials of the private sector to provide public transport services in the United States, this seminar examines the relationship of politics to economies in motivating government decision-making.
Over 100 interviews conducted for seven case studies revealed that ideologically as well as financially-backed power plays, have driven
outcomes. Cases review the experiences in five cities, which have debated bus services contracting. The political environments and decision-making outcomes in a city such as Denver -- where Republican dominated state legislature mandated that a fixed percentage of service be privatized, and Los Angeles --
where expansion of privatization has met resistance from a Democratic-dominated state legislature, were compared. Cases additionally explored political reactions to attempts by private jitney (12-15 seat van)
operators to set up shop independently in two cities.
In the end, customers, typically low-income and without alternatives to taking transit, as well as taxpayers often lose out from the politics
governing the private provision of public transport.
About the speaker
Dr.Jonathan E.D. Richmond graduated from London School of Economics and Political Science in 1979
with a Bachelor of Economics degree, earned his master 's degree in Science in Transportation in 1981,
and his Ph. D. in Transportation Planning in 1991 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During various feasibility studies and preliminary planning activities in the period from 1982 to 1983 he
worked as Transportation Planner for Southern California Association of Governments. In 1985 to 1994, he joined MIT as an instructor and a visiting scientist.
In 1997 he worked as a consultant for The World Bank to evaulate transportation infrastucture and
operations options for Mauritius and joined the research team of Harvard University to evaluate
performance of new urban rail passenger system in the United Stated from 1997 to 2000.
Jonathan Richmond is the author of the รข??Introducing Philosophical Theories to Urban Transportation
Planning' in Chapter 'Planning Ethics: A Reader in Planning Theory, Practice, and Education'. He is also the editor of the transportation articles for the Los Angeles Times, Sydney and Morning Herald.
May 29, 2003: The Telecommunications / School of Advanced Technologies will be presenting a guest lecture on 'Challenges in Wireless Multimedia.' The lecture will be conducted by Prof. Borko Furht, Head, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, USA at 2:00-3:00 p.m. in TC Room 203, Telecommunications Building
All interested persons are welcome.
Abstract
The multimedia and Internet technologies including World Wide Web have already created many benefits, but we can still only guess at many benefits these liberating new technologies will create in the future. Today, nations and corporations are making enormous efforts to establish a wireless infrastructure, including declaring a new wireless spectrum, building new towers, and inventing new handsets, high-speed chips, and protocols.
This talk will focus on 3G systems that will provide data transmission speeds of several Mbps, which are needed for multimedia. We will discuss wireless multimedia challenges including: (1) adaptive and scalable coding that will optimize digital media for mobile devices with limited processing power, (2) error resilience when delivering rich digital media over wireless networks at low and varying transmission speeds, (3) network access including rate control and (4) multimedia and video security. The synergy between the 3G wireless Internet and multimedia, promises to bring a tremendous explosion in application possibilities. The talk will end with a 7-minute video that shows a virtual workspace of the near future based on wireless multimedia-based systems and devices.
About the Speaker
PROF. BORKO FURHT (Homepage: http://www.cse.fau.edu/~borko/) is a professor and chairman in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida. His current research is in multimedia systems and Internet, video coding and compression, video databases, and wireless multimedia. He has published over 160 papers, 19 books, and holds 2 patents. Prof. Furht received research grants from national agencies such as NSF and NASA, and from industrial corporations such as IBM, General Electric, Xerox, and Datacom.
Prof. Furht is a founder and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (ISSN 1380-7501 Kluwer Academic Publishers), Homepage: http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1380-7501
and also the editor-in-chief of International Journal of Computers and Applications (ISSN 1206-212X Acta Press), Homepage: http://www.actapress.com/journals/journals.htm#Top
He recently completed two handbooks, published by the CRC Press, 'Handbook of Video Databases' and 'Wireless Internet Handbook.' He was the Program Chairman for America for the IEEE Conference on Multimedia Systems and Computing '99 in Florence, Italy, area chairman for the IEEE Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Tokyo 2001, and associate chair for ACM Multimedia 2002 in Juan les Pines. He is also consulting editor for the Book Series on Multimedia Systems and Applications (Kluwer) and Internet and Communications (CRC Press).
May 29-30, 2003: Cluster Computing Technology Training Course. The training course, to be held in room 218, Chalerm Prakiat (ISE) Building, is organized by AIT and Kasetsart University. The speakers will be Dr. Voratas Kachitvichyanukul, AIT and Dr. Putchong Uthayopas, Kasetsart University
Outline
The training course will introduce users to the concept of cluster computing and the relevant technology as well as how to use the cluster system to service their computing needs. The Optima cluster at AIT will be used as the resource for the training. The course will offer hand-on session so the users are encouraged to bring along existing programs that they might be interested in running on computer cluster.
Pre-requisite
Basic Unix skill (Unix commands, Unix editors such as VI or EMACS)
C or Fortran programming
Schedule
Day 1
Introduction to Parallel Computing
Access to the Optima cluster at AIT
Lab 1, Basic surviving skills
Basic MPI programming
Lab 2, MPI Hand-on session
Day 2
More on MPI programming
Lab 3, MPI Hand-on session
Parallel Genetic Algorithm via PGApack
Lab 4, Hand-on session
For more information, please email Dr. Voratas at voratas@ait.ac.th. To register please call Khun Eang at tel. 02-524-6601. Please note that seats are limited.
June 30, 2003: Seminar on 'Constitutive Modelling of Sand Based on the Concept of Hypoplasticity' will be held at 9:00 a.m. in room N240, SCE Building. The seminar will be conducted by Prof. Erich Bauer, Ao. Univ.-Prof., Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn., Institute of General Mechanics, Graz University of Technology, Austria.
Abstract
A special class of a hypoplastic constitutive model is proposed to describe the mechanical properties of granular materials like sand. The concept of hypoplasticity differs fundamentally from the concept of elastoplasticity as no decomposition of the strain into reversible and irreversible parts is needed. Furthermore, the flow rule and the stress limit condition are not described by separate functions in hypoplasticity but they are included in the evolution equation for the state variables. With a unified description of the interaction between pressure level and density the model can be applied to a wider range of pressures and densities, using only one set of constitutive constants. Micro-properties of granular materials manifested during shear banding can be taken into account with an extension of the classical continuum approach to a micro-polar continuum. The advantage of the hypoplastic concept not only lies in the simple formulation of the constitutive equations and their implementation in a finite element code but also in an easy adaptation of the constitutive constants to experiments. It is shown by comparing the predictions with the experimental data on dense and loose sand that the hypoplastic constitutive model is capable of reproducing the essential properties of sand under drained and undrained conditions