ISE Associate Professor Tom Sharkey has been named the recipient of the 2016 IISE Operations Research Teaching Award . This award recognizes Professor's Sharkey's development and deployment of the Virtual Office Hour (see Tutorial webpage with links to youtube videos at http://homepages.rpi.edu/~sharkt/ORMVideos.html). This is a highly competitive award with many outstanding nominees. Professor Sharkey will be recognized in the 2016 IISE Annual Conference & Expo May 21-24, 2016 in Anaheim, Calif.
ISE News and Events
Al Wallace, the Yamada Corporation Professor in ISE and Ruth Murrugarra, a faculty member in ISE at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile, are experimenting in fall 2015 co-teaching an engineering ethics course in New York and Santiago, Chile using Internet connection, and voice recognition and language translation softwares.
ISE Faculty Jennifer Pazour was invited by Warehouse Education and Research Council (WERC) as one of five industry thought leaders to the WERCSheet’s Outlook 2016 panel to share her observations and insights on critical issues likely to impact the warehouse/distribution-center sector this year. Jennifer focused on the impact of the millennial generation on workforce and warehouse logistics technology. Her remarks are featured in the January/February 2016 issue of the WERC Sheet .
David Mendonça, an Associate Professor in ISE, is now serving as director of the National Science Foundation's program in Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events. Throughout this program's long history, it has supported foundational research on the interaction between human and technological systems in the context of hazard mitigation and disaster response. Mendonça is the first ISE faculty member to serve as an NSF program officer. His research has previously been supported by multiple NSF grants, including a CAREER award for his work on improvisation in emergency response.
ISE Faculty Thomas C. Sharkey has been awarded the 2015 Rensselaer Alumni Association Teaching Award. The RAA Teaching Award was created in 1994 by the Rensselaer Alumni Association Board of Trustees and is designed to recognize current members of the Rensselaer Faculty for their outstanding teaching techniques, contributions to the campus experience and commitment to students. Professor Sharkey has a set of video tutorial on YouTube about operations research methods http://homepages.rpi.edu/~sharkt/ORMVideos.html.
Institute News
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants throughout New York City and elsewhere use bespoke outdoor structures to offer safer dining experiences for their customers. However, many of these installations do not adequately protect servers, physically separate diners, provide thermal comfort, or easily disassemble if street maintenance is needed.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are revolutionizing the ways in which we live, work, and spend our free time, from the smart devices in our homes to the tasks our phones can carry out. This transformation is being made possible by a surge in data and computing power that can help machine learning algorithms not only perform device-specific tasks, but also help them gain intelligence or knowledge over time.
TROY, N.Y. — Optoelectronic materials that are capable of converting the energy of light into electricity, and electricity into light, have promising applications as light-emitting, energy-harvesting, and sensing technologies. However, devices made of these materials are often plagued by inefficiency, losing significant useful energy as heat. To break the current limits of efficiency, new principles of light-electricity conversion are needed.
The future of quantum computing may depend on the further development and understanding of semiconductor materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). These atomically thin materials develop unique and useful electrical, mechanical, and optical properties when they are manipulated by pressure, light, or temperature.
More strategic and coordinated travel restrictions likely could have reduced the spread of COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. That’s according to new research published in Communications Physics. This finding stems from new modeling conducted by a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.