CORPORATE TALK SERIES
Venkatesh Venkataramanujam
Venkatesh Venkataramanujam is currently the Senior Design Engineer at Amazon Robotics.He received his Ph.D. and Master's from Florida Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering (Kinematics, Dynamic Systems and Controls - Robotics) and his B.S. from University of Mumbai in theField Of Study Mechanical Engineering. Previously he was the Trainee Engineer in Fitwell Construction Company and worked for Research Assistant in Clarkson University and Florida Institute of Technology. He was the CAE Engineer -Core CAE Methods and Integration (Digital Innovation: Virtual Verification)at Ford Motor Company and was the Solution Design Engineer in Amazon Robotics.
Title of The Talk: The applications of Robotics in Warehouse Operations and Customer Fulfillment.
Abstract: The advent of e-commerce has increasingly necessitated the use of automation in warehouses to meet consumer demand. This has resulted in robots, and humans working in collaborative environments. This talk will explore the roles that robotics will play in the fulfillment industry and the opportunities they present.
Harold Jean-Baptiste
Harold Jean-Baptiste is the Chief Data Scientist at Capital Intelligence Advisors. His team is responsible for developing fixed income, derivatives and quantitative equity strategies, as well as cross-asset allocation for investment clients. Harold is a seasoned data scientist with over 16 years of experience in the financial services and insurance industries.
Prior to joining Capital Intelligence Advisors Harold was Executive Director Chief Data Scientist at Segmint where he developed algorithms for banking transaction data. Prior to Segmint Harold was a Data Scientist at General Electric Asset Management (GEAM) developing investment algorithms for fixed income and equities investment. Prior to GEAM Harold lead a group a where he implemented Big Data Hadoop technology architecture and data science solutions for a Fortune 500 company.
Harold holds a Bachelor of Integrated Information Systems and a Master of Business Administration in Finance from Long Island University.
Title of The Talk: Big data and the internet of thing is changing how business understand consumers behavior footprint.
Abstract: The evolution of data in the last 15 years have change the way businesses operate and how we understand the collection of data. In the last decade the engineering of new technology to collect data has transformed to become a new industry and a very profitable business model. The business industry have seen the advantage of capturing data and the forward thinking firms are starting to understanding relative financial value and the intangible domain knowledge to management. The forward thinking firms are starting to execute strategy to implement new technologies infrastructure and understand the value of the data. Data has become a very valuable asset to companies and having the right skill set and technology platform to capture the hidden value to monetize the data to be a key value to how companies grow for the future..Data Science algorithms have help the industry extract the true value of the data and help businesses make smarter decisions for true alpha growth.
What is the future of data, technology and data science for successful firms?
Nick Spanos
Nick Spanos is one of the earliest adopters of bitcoin and blockchain, founder of the Bitcoin Center NYC, and CEO of Blockchain Technologies Corp. and Zap.org. Zap.org works to solve one of the biggest challenges in the blockchain industry by providing an open marketplace for oracles that can provide smart contracts with access to off-chain data.
Additionally, Spanos is the founder and inventor of VoteWatcher, the patented first-ever blockchain voting platform. He was also featured in the recent documentary Banking on Bitcoin and has been part of many conferences on blockchain technology.
Title of The Talk: Rise of the Initial Coin Offering
Abstract: Zap represents an entirely new speculative data market where not only are individuals able to make money from having valuable data they can also make money by speculating on the data of others being valuable in the future through the utility of bonding curves based on the research of Simon De la rouvier. Bonding curves and curation markets create an
economic incentive for data to remain honest and maintained throughout its utility. This same economic incentive of honest data provides an opportunity for a new market with unlimited potential.
Matthew Krieger
Matthew Krieger is a technologist and executive with experience in information technology, manufacturing, publishing and fundraising. Matt is an Advisory Chief Technology Officer for non-profits and VP of Technology with manufacturer Cober, Inc. where is leads engineering and an industrial IoT initiative. Previously Matt had overall responsibility for IT at QSP, Inc., the nation’s largest youth fundraising company at the time, and held senior IT leadership positions at Time, Inc. and The Reader’s Digest Association. Matt serves on the board of two non-profit organizations, is a frequent presenter on topics of business, technology and the intersection of each, and is a business mentor with SCORE. Matt is engaged in several blockchain initiatives and is creator of text-to-speech service Lysten httpsss://ilysten.com.
Title of The Talk: IoT Security – More Complex Than It Seems
Abstract : The topic of IoT security is complex and has broad scope. Beyond simple physical device security and the protection of the communications channel from prying eyes are considerations around authenticating devices and IoT data aggregation hubs, ensuring integrity of device messages, securing the wider physical footprint of geographically distributed IoT sensors resulting in a larger attack surface, ongoing patching and management of the hardware and other considerations. This talk will explore the definition of security in the context of IoT, look at threats including some interesting edge cases and will explore options for securing the IoT ecosystem.
Vince Crisler
Vince Crisler is a proven cybersecurity and IT strategy leader with deep experience in private-sector and federal government environments. As the CEO of Dark Cubed, Vince offers technical, operational and strategic expertise to CEOs, CIOs and executive teams for companies of all sizes, as well as critical leadership in developing leading-edge products for threat detection and management. Vince also has extensive experience supporting the Department of Homeland Security on the development and implementation of cyber security technologies to protect Government and Private Sector critical infrastructures. Previously a Communications Officer in the United States Air Force, Vince served for many years in the Executive Office of the President (The White House) and the Pentagon. In these roles, he developed his facility in translating technical challenges for nontechnical audiences and executing strategic IT objectives.
The author of numerous articles on cybersecurity risk and threat identification, Vince speaks frequently on cybersecurity management and IT security strategy.
Title of The Talk: The State of IoT Security
Abstract: Vince will present the technical findings and analysis from a recent security study his company, Dark Cubed, performed on 12 consumer IoT devices. His presentation will include the details of how they performed the research, what they discovered, and the key findings resulting from the study.
Milton Chang
Dr. Milton Chang is the VP of Engineering and Technology of DomaniSystems Inc. (www.domanisystems.com) in Shelton, CT. Dr. Chang has 20+ years of experiences in Research and Development management in developing complex electronics and software-centric systems. His prior successful start-up includes TranSwitch Corporation, Shelton, CT, which went public in 1995; Systems on
Silicon, Inc. (SOSI) located in Princeton, NJ, which was acquired by TranSwitch in 2002; and Opulan Technologies which was a Communication IC startup with Research and Development in Shanghai that
merged with Atheros/Qualcomm in 2009. Dr. Chang received his BS in Electrical Engineering from National Cheng-Kong University in Taiwan and Ph.D. from Michigan State University also in Electrical
Engineering. Dr. Chang has been granted 16 US patents and has a number of them pending. His current research interests are in the area of IoT/IoE, Blockchain and Machine Learning – especially the convergence of these three technologies.
Title of The Talk: The Art of Possible: IoT, AI, and Blockchain
Abstract: Security breach of Internet of Things (IoT) network could be very expensive for enterprises especially for smaller companies. According to a recent news report, such a security breach can cost up to 13% of a small company’s revenue. Traditional cyber security issues always get our attention but IoT security issues have not grabbed the nation’s attention the way it deserves. The deployment of IoT devices enlarge the attack surface thus IoT attacks can render connected devices dangerous to end-users and the public at large.Traditional security approaches so far have proven to be ineffective in defending IoT networks against DDoS, Botnets and Malware attacks. What is the solution?
For large scale deployment of IoT networks to be viable, convergence of IoT, AI, and Blockchain Technology seem to provide the answer we are all looking for. For instance, an IoT device similar to fitbit could sense health and activities, AI would watch and react, and all interactions could be protected by a blockchain.
This talk will illustrate some use cases where a combination of IoT, AI, and Blockchain technologies results in commercially viable services and applications.
RESEARCH TALK SERIES
Jason Nieh
Jason Nieh is a Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of the Software Systems Laboratory at Columbia University. He has served as a consultant to both government and industry, including as the technical advisor to nine States on the Microsoft Antitrust Settlement, and as an expert witness before the US International Trade Commission. He was previously Chief Scientist of Cellrox and Desktone, acquired by VMware. Professor Nieh has made research contributions in software systems across a broad range of areas, including operating systems, virtualization, thin-client computing, cloud computing, mobile computing, multimedia, web technologies, and performance evaluation. Technologies he developed are now widely used in Android, Linux, and other major operating system platforms. Honors for his research work include the Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award, awarded once every two years in the physical sciences and engineering, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Department of Energy Early Career Award, five IBM Faculty Awards and two IBM Shared University Research Awards, six Google Research Awards, and various best paper awards, including those from MobiCom, SIGCSE, SIGMETRICS, and SOSP. A dedicated teacher, he received the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award from the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association for his innovations in teaching operating systems and for introducing virtualization as a pedagogical tool. Professor Nieh earned his B.S. from MIT and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in Electrical Engineering.
Title of The Talk: Recent Trends in Virtualization
Dan Rubenstein
Dan Rubenstein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. He received a B.S. degree in mathematics from M.I.T., an M.A. in math from UCLA, and a PhD in computer science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests are in network technologies, applications, and performance analysis. He was an editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, was general chair of IFIP Performance 2017, program chair of IFIP Networking 2010 and ACM Sigmetrics 2011, and has received an NSF CAREER Award, IBM Faculty Award, the Best Student Paper award from the ACM SIGMETRICS 2000 conference, and Paper awards from the IEEE ICNP 2003 Conference, ACM CoNext 2008 Conference, and IEEE Communications 2011. He spent 2011 at Google, and in 2012 was the original Chief Scientist at Infinio, a company founded on his research at Columbia.
Title of The Talk: Addressing the Communications Needs of First Responders in Large-Scale Emergencies
Abstract: The past two decades have yielded an enormous shift in how well connected and reliable our communications systems allow us to be. Nonetheless, first responders still have grave concerns about maintaining effective communication during large-scale emergencies during which dependable, well-provisioned infrastructure may not be fully operational. While some of the problems are policy-driven, there remain areas ripe for research that can help address staying connected through non-conventional means. In this talk, I will discuss Columbia's ERICA project which is designed to address several areas in which research can affect the technological future of first response, and focus in on some particular networking issues that we are attempting to address.
Yang (Richard) Yang
Yang (Richard) Yang is the Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Yale University, where he founded and leads the Laboratory of Networked Systems (LANS). Dr. Yang's research is supported by both US government funding agencies and leading industrial corporations, and spans areas including computer networks, mobile computing, wireless networking, and network security. His work has been implemented/adopted in products/systems of major companies (e.g., AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Youku), and featured in mainstream media including Economist, Forbes, Guardian, Chronicle of Higher Education, Information Week, MIT Technology Review, Science Daily, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wired, among others. His awards include a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and a Google Faculty Research Award. Dr. Yang's received his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University (1993), and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin (1998 and 2001).
Changxi Zheng
Changxi Zheng is currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University.He is also co-directing Columbia's Computer Graphics Group (C2G2) in Columbia Vision and Graphics Center (CVGC). He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University with the Best Dissertation Award and his B.S. from Shanghai Jiaotong University. He currently serves as an associated editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics. He was a Conference Chair for SCA in 2017, has won an NSF CAREER Award, and was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” in science and healthcare in 2013. He received the Best Paper Awards from 2016 SCA and 2017 UIST, among others. Changxi's current research is on the boundary between computational methods and physical devices. He is particularly interested in developing simulation methods for complex physical systems, the computational models for optical and acoustic sensing, and the computational design of structures and materials.
Pierre Larochelle
Pierre Larochelle (Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Irvine) is the Department Head and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Previously he served as an Associate Dean and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the design of complex robotic mechanical systems and enabling creativity and innovation in design. He is the founding director of the Robotics and Spatial Systems Laboratory (RASSL), has over 100 publications, holds two US patents, and serves as a consultant on robotics, automation, machine design, creativity & innovation, and computer-aided design. He serves on the Executive Committee of ASME’s Design Engineering Division and will serve as Chair of the Division in 2018-2019. He serves on ABET’s Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) and as an ABET Accreditation Visit Team Chair. Moreover, he currently serves as the Chair of the U.S. Committee on the Theory of Mechanisms & Machine Science and represents the U.S. in the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism & Machine Science (IFToMM) (2016 – 2020). He has served as Chair of the ASME Mechanisms & Robotics Committee (2010-2014) and as an Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanisms & Robotics (2013 – 2016, 2017 – present), the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design (2005 – 2011), and for Mechanics Based Design of Structures & Machines (2006 – 2013). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), a Senior Member of IEEE, and a member of Tau Beta Pi, Pi Tau Sigma, ASEE, and the Order of the Engineer.
Title of The Talk: The role of digital communication in manufacturing industry 4.0
Abstract: The industrial revolution of the 19th century brought forth a step change in manufacturing processes from manual human labor to hands-off dedicated production equipment. This paradigm remained intact until the 1970’s during which robotics, i.e. flexible automation was introduced. From the 1970’s until now we have seen a harmonious balance between the flexible automation provided by robots and the rigid automation provided by dedicated production machines. Today, a new paradigm is emerging; a quartet of robots, machines, humanoids, and humans working together to produce high quality products that are customized to satiate the consumer’s demands. This talk will explore the roles that digital communications have to play in this new paradigm and the opportunities they present for digital communication researchers and practitioners.
Robert Moskovitch
Robert Moskovitch is a faculty at the department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben Gurion University, in which he is heading the Complex Data Analytics Lab.He did his post doc fellowship at the department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. He is a member of BGU’s Zlotowsky Center for Neuroscience, and BGU’s @Cyber security center. Prior to that, he headed several Research and Development projects in Information Security at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories. He is an Academic Editor at PLOS ONE,
and has served on several journal editorial boards, as well as on program committees of several conferences, such as ACM KDD and IEEE ICHI and workshops in Information Security and Biomedical Informatics, as well as edited recently special issues at JASIST and JBI. He published more than seventy peer reviewed papers in leading journals and conferences, such as IEEE ICDM, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, KAIS, JAMIA, JBI and more, several of which had won best-paper awards. His lab focuses mainly on the development of Temporal Data Analytics methods, and their applications to the biomedical domain, but not exclusively. Dr. Moskovitch’s lab is funded by Microsoft, IBM, Amdocs, and governmental agencies, and collaborates with scientists from Coumbia University, Mount Sinai, Peking University, IIT New Delhi and more. He is the Analytics Program Chair of IEEE International Conference of Healthcare Informatics 2018 (NYC).
Title of the Talk: Connecting the dots longitudinally in Biomedical Data using Temporal Abstraction and Time Intervals Analytics
Abstract: Analysis of heterogeneous multivariate time stamped data is one of the most challenging topics in data science in general, and in healthcare analytics specifically. Time stamped data can be sampled in a fixed frequency, commonly when measured by electronic means, but also in a non fixed frequency, often when made manually - a typical situation in biomedical data, whether fast data such as in ICU, or slow such as generally in EHR. Additionally, raw temporal data can represent durations of a continuous or nominal value represented by time intervals. In this talk the idea of transforming time point series into meaningful symbolic time intervals, using a process often called Temporal Abstraction, will be presented to bring all the temporal variables, having various representations, into a uniform representation. Then, KarmaLego, a fast time intervals mining method for the discovery of non-ambiguous Time Intervals Related Patterns (TIRPs) represented by Allen's temporal relations, will be presented. TIRPs can be used for several purposes: temporal knowledge discovery, and classification of multivariate temporal data, using the KarmaLegoS framework, in which TIRPs are used as classification features. To increase the classification accuracy a novel supervised Temporal Discretization for Classification (TD4C) method will be introduced, including an evaluation on three real life datasets from the biomedical domain. Finally, results of the use of TIRPs for outcomes prediction in patient data, such as clinical procedures or conditions, will be demonstrated on Columbia University Medical Center EHR data.
Xia Zhou
Xia Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. She received her PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2013. Her general research interests are in mobile systems and wireless networking. She is a recipient of the Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Creative and Scholarly Achievement in 2018 and named as N2Women: Rising Stars in Networking and Communication in 2017. She has also won the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017, NSF CAREER Award in 2016, and Google Faculty Research Award in 2014.
Title of The Talk: Battery-Free Eye Tracking
Abstract: Continuous eye tracking is critical for identifying health and cognitive issues, and assessing the effectiveness of clinical treatments. It is also crucial for the development of human-to-computer interaction by allowing hands-free, attentive user interfaces. Existing wearable eye trackers commonly use cameras, entailing a prohibitive cost and consuming a nontrivial amount of power.
In this talk I will present a minimalist approach to eye tracking, which replaces cameras with low-cost, small photodiodes to significantly reduce the cost and power consumption. The key rationale stems from pupil's light absorption property, which causes changes in reflected light around the eye as the pupil moves or its size varies. Such changes in reflected light can be sensed by a circular array of photodiodes around the eye and utilized to infer pupil's position and size. I will present our designs of eye trackers following this principle for virtual reality and regular eyeglasses, and conclude with discussions on future work.
In cheol Jeong
In cheol Jeong is currently an assistant research professor in the department of Material Science and Engineering, and in the inHealth Measurement Corps at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Jeong received his PhD in Advanced Biomedical Engineering from Yonsei University. His post-doctoral fellowships were in the department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at Seoul National University Hospital, in the division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at Johns Hopkins University, and in the Johns Hopkins individualized Health Initiative. He has researched and developed medical devices and systems for ubiquitous healthcare applications; specifically, in the design and development of electronic and data- based biomedical systems. He also has contributed to a variety of research topics in heterogeneous
clinical and administrative datasets to improve health care quality and patient safety, and to facilitate the comprehensive patient-centered health care delivery model. His current research interests are the design and development of patient’s individualized medical systems, real-time safety monitoring systems, and health assessment systems.
Title of The Talk: Towards an individual digital health state profile
Abstract: The goal of individualized medicine is to provide the right care to the right person at the right time. The major mission involves creating and disseminating tools that harness scientific knowledge to individualize care and improve health for all. These tools improve decision-making in the prevention and treatment of a range of conditions. In all scientific endeavors, the plan realizes that each health decision should be fully informed by scientific knowledge. The goal of my research is to provide expertise in the development of point-of-care devices and algorithms to measure analytes and biomarkers from patient and sensors for real-time monitoring of health state. These measurements provide the basis for meta-analysis within specific disease types; laying a foundation for improved clinical decisions. My research is especially interested in enhancements that will lower costs, reduce measurement times, or improve sensitivity. Thus, in my research, innovative new applications are developed for existing sensors because many sensor technologies can be repurposed for applications in individualized health. The ongoing research currently includes meeting with clinicians and primary care providers to identify measurement needs that will improve medical decision-making, building a measurement portal to catalog the state-of-the-art technologies, and developing target specifications. The presentation will cover the Hopkins and Mount Sinai projects that are likely to meet the goals of U.S. Digital Health IT. The impact of research activities is introduced with projects on individual health profiling of both in-patients and out-patients.