News

More Than 3,600 New Drivers Have Used Distractology 101

The Newton Patch reports that Distractology 101, an interactive driving simulator program developed by the Arbella Insurance Human Performance Laboratory in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, has now trained at least 3,621 new drivers about the dangers of distracted driving since it began touring the Northeast in 2010. Distractology 101 will be visiting Newton for a week beginning on February 26. The technology for Distractology 101 was developed under the leadership of Professor Donald Fisher, head of the MIE department and director of the Arbella Insurance Human Performance Laboratory, for the Arbella Insurance Group.

Brack Receives Distinguished Service Award

Business owner and philanthropist Robert B. Brack, a 1960 graduate of UMass Amherst in Civil Engineering, has been announced as the initial recipient of the newly established Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute (CRSI) Distinguished Service Award. According to the CRSI, the award was prompted by “Brack’s career-long dedication to both the reinforced concrete industry and the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute.” Among Brack’s many contributions to his alma mater, he spearheaded the funding campaign for the new Robert B. Brack Structural Testing Facility. He was also the recent recipient of a UMass Amherst Distinguished Achievement Award.

Polizzi’s FEAST Algorithm Included in Intel’s Math Kernel Library

The FEAST algorithm proposed in 2009 by Eric Polizzi of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department – an algorithm that represents a radical departure from "textbook approaches" to solving the legendary eigenvalue problem – received a major endorsement in early February when it was integrated into the Intel® Math Kernel Library, one of the world’s leading and most used mathematical libraries. Polizzi’s FEAST algorithm is now featured as the Intel library’s main eigenvalue solver, and it can be found under the name "MKL Extended EigenSolver."

McLaughlin Speaks About Chasing Storms Across Disciplines in Boston

On February 17, David McLaughlin, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the director of the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) at the College of Engineering, spoke about Chasing Storms Across Disciplines during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. McLaughlin gave his presentation during a symposium entitled "Dynamics of Disasters: Harnessing the Science of Networks to Save Lives," organized by Anna Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the Isenberg School of Management. The symposium took place between 3:00 and 4:30 p.m. in Room 208 of the convention center.

EWB Returns to Kenya for Eighth Engineering Trip

Jambo! In January, a team of seven students and one faculty member from the campus Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter spent two weeks in Kenya, the eighth trip since EWB’s Namawanga project began in March of 2006, providing safe drinking water for several thousand rural Kenyans. The team included five students from UMass Amherst (Tim Light, Jake Palatine, Deidre Ericson, Gene Rush, Alex Light) and two students from Smith College (Natalie Gill, Lindsay Duran), along with faculty and professional mentor John Tobiason, a professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. The focus of the trip was largely to monitor past projects and assess future projects, in addition to replacing parts of the hand pump installed on the EWB-UMass-funded borehole that was drilled in 2009.

Hyers Teaches Class on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Smith College

Robert W. Hyers of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department recently ran a weeklong class that, among other things, taught students at Smith College how to create a business plan and present it to investors. ” As Hyers said about his Smith course, “The class was about intellectual frameworks for evaluating business ideas. Ideas are like photographs; the best way to get a good one is to take a lot of them. Then the faster you can pick out the promising ones, the less time you'll invest in ideas that won't work.” The class was also covered by a feature article in the Hampshire Gazette.

Milestone Paper Hits Coveted 1,000-citation Mark

The Web of Science notes that a landmark paper written by H. Henning Winter, the Distinguished University Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Laboratory for Experimental Rheology in the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department, has reached the celebrated 1,000-citation mark. As ChE Department Head T.J. Lakis Mountziaris notes, “This is a remarkable achievement.” Henning’s milestone paper is entitled “Analysis of Linear Viscoelasticity of a Crosslinking Polymer at the Gel Point” and was published in 1986 in the Journal of Rheology. Collectively, Henning’s papers have now been cited at least 8,581 times. The entire paper can be found here: http://rheology.tripod.com/z04.02.pdf.

DPO Outreach Visits Revere Middle School

Over the winter break, two members of the Diversity Programs Office’s outreach team of engineering students, Xuyen Mai and Gabriel Abreu, returned to their former school and staged a user-friendly engineering event for 15 middle-school children at the Rumney Marsh Academy in Revere, Massachusetts. “Our primary goal is to get kids interested in the field of engineering,” said outreach leader Mai. “We do so by introducing them to what engineering is through our personal experience with the field and hands-on, age-appropriate engineering projects.” The event was also covered by a local newspaper, the Lynn Daily Item: http://m.itemlive.com/articles/2013/01/14/news/news03.txt.

Company of Alum Takes Winner of Winners Competition

The New England Clean Energy Council Institute (NECEC Institute) has announced that Black Island Wind Turbines of Springfield, a startup company founded by alumnus Patrick Quinlan ’82 of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, has been awarded $50,000 as part of the institute’s Cleantech Innovations New England 2012 Winner of Winners competition. The award is meant to help clean-technology startups move closer to commercialization. Black Island is one of Quinlan’s two recently established companies that have been doing very well in business plan and accelerator competitions lately. Both of Quinlan’s startups are spinoffs of Celadon Innovation, founded by Quinlan to provide consulting services and renewable energy technology development.

Moritz Comments in Popular Mechanics Article

Csaba Andras Moritz, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the director of the Nanoscale Architectures Laboratory, was featured prominently in a story in Popular Mechanics about how scientists are developing ways of storing data using synthetic DNA. As the Popular Mechanics story explains, scientists in Nature report that they have converted a record number of digital megabytes into genetic code. The entire set of Shakespearean sonnets, a 26-second clip of Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, a photograph—they’ve all been recorded onto synthetic DNA, where they could be safely stored for thousands of years. But, as the article says, “don’t start shopping around for a DNA hard drive yet. It takes a lot of time to both write and read DNA sequences, and it also requires laboratory equipment.”

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