Seminars, Workshops and Conferences
April 8, 2004: Special Seminar on ELID-a Nano Removal Process for Extra Hard Materials will be conducted by Dr. Ioan D. Marinescu, AIT Visiting Professor & Fulbright Fellow and Professor and Director, Precision Micro-Machining Center, College of Engineering University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA. The seminar will be held at 11:00 a.m. in Room IE-106, Chalerm Prakiat Building.
All Microelectronics and ISE students are expected to attend. Interested persons are welcome.
Abstract:
ELID stays for ELectrolytic In-Process Dressing and it is a new technology developed about 10-15 years ago in Japan. It is a grinding process that employs metal bonded abrasive wheels continuously in-process dressed by the mean of an electrolytic process. ELID uses electrochemical electrolysis to remove the metal bonds and worn diamond particles, to expose the fresh diamond grains, and to restore the efficiency during grinding operation.
ELID grinding can produce ultra precision grinding performances for extra hard materials at nanometer level. The obtained surface is a mirror like surface with roughness at nano and sun-nanometer level.
The seminar will present the fundamental of the ELID process together with stock removal mechanism and physics and chemistry involved in this mechanism. Constructive solutions of the ELID components will be presented together with case studies for materials like glass, ceramics, sapphire, and AlTiC.
April 8, 2004: Evaluating Example-based Search Tools Seminar to be held at 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. in Room 209, Computer Science Building. The seminar will be conducted by Ms. Pearl Pu, Director of Human Computer Interaction Group, Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract:
A crucial element in consumer electronic commerce is a catalog tool that not only finds the product for the user, but also convinces him that he has made the best choice. To do that, it is important to show him ample choices while keeping his interaction effort below an acceptable limit. Among the various interaction models used in operational e-commerce sites, ranked lists are by far the most popular tool for product navigation and selection. However, as the number of product features and the complexity of user's criteria increase, a ranked list's efficiency becomes less satisfactory. As an alternative, research groups from the intelligent user interface community have developed various example-based search tools, including SmartClient from our laboratory. These tools not only perform personalized search, but also support tradeoff analysis.
However, despite the academic interest, example-based search paradigms have not been widely adopted in practice.
We have examined the usability of such tools on a variety of tasks involving selection and tradeoff. The studies clearly show that example-based search is comparable to ranked lists on simple tasks, but significantly reduces the error rate and search time when complex tradeoffs are involved. This shows that such tools are likely to be useful particularly for extending the scope of consumer e-commerce to more complex products.
About Pearl Pu
Dr. Pearl Pu is currently a research scientist and director of the HCI Group in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). She obtained her Master and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in artificial intelligence and computer graphics. She was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2001, both in the database and HCI groups. While there, she gave seminars at Xerox PARC's weekly seminar series and Stanford's HCI
Design Studio class as guest lecturer.
She was also co-founder of Iconomic Systems (1997-2001), and invented the any-criteria search method for finding configurable and multi-attribute products in heterogeneous electronic catalogs. Her recent research grants cover activities in decision support systems, information visualization, query optimization for digital libraries, scalable user experience, social
navigation, and advanced display techniques.
Her recent publications included papers from ACM ECommerce, International Conferences on Intelligent User Interface, ACM CHI, IEEE InfoVis, AVI and
the Constraints journal's special issue on Constraint Agents. She was conference co-chair for IFIP's visual database conference in 2002, and is serving as a committee member for numerous conferences.
April 8, 2004: Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) Activities presentation to be held at 1:30 p.m. in Room 203, Telecom Building. The presentation will be conducted by Damien RIQUET, Delegate, Southeast Asia,
Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF), Bangkok.
TSF is a French NGO specialised in emergency telecommunications which is in partnership with Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC).
Telecoms Sans Frontieres is a humanitarian NGO specialiing in emergency telecommunications. Thanks to a permanent monitoring centre, as soon as a catastrophe or conflict is announced, its teams can intervene anywhere in the world and in less than 48 hours. They install within minutes an operational telecommunications centre right at the heart of the event. The idea for TSF was the result of a simple observation made after many years' experience with general humanitarian charities. During missions in ex-Yugoslavia, and in Kurdistan during the Gulf War, its founders realized that as well as medical or food aid, there was a real need for telecommunications. These conflicts often led to massive displacements of populations, separated families, and no communications infrastructure was in place to help these people contact their relatives. During the first missions of TSF, it then emerged that the rescue teams sent to the emergency sites encountered similar problems: they had difficulty coordinating their action in areas where the communication networks were destroyed or jammed. Today, new technologies, the miniaturization of components and the increasing development of satellite networks enable highly mobile teams to be assembled who can respond to these communication needs in all circumstances, whatever the type of terrain. Technological progress can also play a significant role in favour of isolated populations of developing countries. Today, TSF is dedicating more and more its know-how and its means of telecommunication to long-term solidarity projects contributing thus to reducing the technological gap.
April 9, 2004:
Seminar on GIS based integrated approach for Urban Flood Disaster Risk Management will be held in Room W208, SCE at 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Dr. Dushmanta DUTTA, Visiting Associate Professor, WEM, Coordinator, Regional Network Office for Urban Safety (RNUS), SCE, AIT
and Associate Professor, University of Tokyo, Japan will conduct the seminar.