News

K2I Awards Eleven Fellowships
 With the aid of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (K2I), 11 graduate students at Rice University have been awarded fellowships for their research and educational achievements in computational science and engineering, and high-performance computing.  (November 30, 2012)

Six Rice University professors elected AAAS fellows
 Carson, Ensor, Kavraki, Natelson, Phillips, Vannucci honored by scientific societyRice University professors Daniel Carson, Katherine Ensor, Lydia Kavraki, Douglas Natelson, George Phillips and Marina Vannucci have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.  (November 30, 2012)

 Congratulations to Tayfun Tezduyar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, who has been selected to receive the Argentine Association for Computational Mechanics 2012 AMCA Prize to the International Scientific Career. This award recognizes the scientific trajectory of recipients in the field of computational mechanics and also the interaction with research centers in Argentina.  (October 29, 2012)

Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
 "Thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee," wrote the prophet Isaiah. This phrase has been popping into my mind as I have been following the recent raging discussions over the topic of MOOCs.  (October 29, 2012)

Kavraki, Mikos elected to Institute of Medicine
Two Rice University scientists were elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies today.Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and professor of bioengineering, and Antonios Mikos, the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, are part of the new class of inductees named today at the organization’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.  (October 16, 2012)

Enrollment tops 54,0000 for Rice University's first coursera class
 It’s the rare scientist who experiments on himself in front of his own family and 54,000 strangers. No wonder Joe Warren is nervous.“I feel like an astronaut on top of a rocket that’s about to blast off,” the Rice computer scientist said about the massive open online course (MOOC) that he and three co-instructors are preparing to teach Oct. 15 on the education website Coursera. The class, An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, is Rice’s first on Coursera. Enrollment topped 54,000 Oct. 5, with hundreds of students signing up each day.   (October 5, 2012)

BioHouston to honor Kavraki
 Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering at Rice University, will be among the honorees at BioHouston’s 2012 Annual Lunch Celebrating Women in Science. In a statement, BioHouston said: “By celebrating the achievements of women leaders in science, we hope to inspire others to pursue research and applications that will spur economic growth and prosperity for our region and the state as a whole.”   (October 4, 2012)

Rice launches sweeping Energy and Environment Initiative
HOUSTON — (Sept. 20, 2012) — Rice University today announced the Energy and Environment Initiative (E2I), a sweeping plan to support interdisciplinary research that will draw experts from every corner of the university to work with Houston’s energy industry to overcome barriers to the sustainable development and use of current and alternative forms of energy. "E2I will allow Rice to initiate new lines of computationally based energy-related research from seismic imaging to modeling fluid flow in oil reservoirs. It will also allow Rice to expand programs like the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology’s Rice Oil and Gas HPC Workshop, which has doubled in attendance in less than five years," said Alan Levander, Rice’s Carey Croneis Professor of Earth Science and director of Rice’s data analysis and visualization cyberinfrastructure (DAVinCI) project.  (September 20, 2012)

Every atom counts in graphene formation
Like tiny ships finding port in a storm, carbon atoms dock with the greater island of graphene in a predictable manner. But until recent research by scientists at Rice University, nobody had the tools to make that kind of prediction.  (September 7, 2012)

K2I Centennial Research Nugget Information
  Eleven teams won cash prizes in the 2012 Centennial Ken Kennedy Institute (K2I) Research Nugget Competition at Rice University, a contest aimed at encouraging engineers and scientists to share their research with the public in a concise, accessible form. “There’s a lot of great research being done here at Rice, but we’re not always good at communicating it to the layman. Our goal with this competition is to help our engineers and scientists communicate what they’re doing, and do it effectively, using nuggets,” said Jan E. Odegard, executive director of K2I. “This is the first of what we hope will be a regular nugget competition hosted by K2I.”  The competition was open to Rice faculty, research staff and students. Contestants were invited to submit a one-page PowerPoint slide outlining a current research project and highlighting the importance of computing or information technology. Odegard and faculty judged the 43 submissions on the basis of “ease of understanding, professionalism and creativity.”      The first-place prize of $1,000 went to “Modeling of a Stent for a Cerebral Aneurysm,” prepared by Kathleen Schjodt, Kenji Takizawa, Nikolay Kostov and Tayfun Tezduyar. “Our goal, as it always is when we try to explain our research to a large audience, is to tell what we are doing and why we are doing it. To some degree, we also try to tell how we are doing it,” said Tezduyar, the James F. Barbour Professor in Mechanical Engineering, whose goal is to enable doctors to customize stents for individual patients. Second place, $500: “Candidate Gene Identification: Google Helps,” by Shuwei Li, Zhenjiang Lan and Michael Kohn. The research is devoted to identifying correct dosages of Wayfarin (rat poison), a widely prescribed blood-thinner for preventing heart attack, stroke and thrombosis. Named runners-up and receiving $250 each: “Taking Microcontrollers Out of the 1970s,” by Thomas W. Barr and Scott Rixner. “We all need more experience communicating. It's part and parcel to being an engineer. That includes being able to explain your work to anyone, at any skill level. I maintain that if you can't do that, you don't yet understand your own topic well enough,” said Barr, a fifth-year graduate student in computer science. “Bioinformatics Help Unveil Environmental Impacts of Nanomaterials,” by Yu Yang, Jing Wang, Mengyan Li and Pedro Alvarez. “Studying Nanocatalysts for Improved H2 Production,” by Zhun Zhao, Ponsak Limpornpipat and Michael S. Wong. “Model Reduction: Large-scale Dynamical Systems,” by Antonio Cosmin Ionita and A.C. Antoulas. Receiving honorable mentions and prizes of $100 each were: “Predicting Endothelial Cell Angiogenic Phenotypes,” by David T. Ryan, Byron L. Long, Jingzhe Hu, Becky Zaunbrecher and Amina A. Qutub. “Automatic Sensing of Structural Damage During Disasters,” by Yongchao Yang and Satish Nagarajaiah. “Atomistic Mechanisms of Graphene Growth,” by Vasilii I. Artyukhov, Yuanyue Liu and Boris I. Yakobson. “Flutter Shutter Video Camera,” by Jason Holloway and Ashok Veeraraghavan. “Protein Network Models for Targeted Cancer Therapy,” by Christine Peterson, Francisco Stingo and Marina Vannucci. “When we announced this competition, we didn’t know what sort of response to expect or the quality of the nuggets we’d receive,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and director of K2I, “but I’m pleased with this first competition. We have great research to share and this will help us do so in a more successfully.”    (September 7, 2012)