List of Announcements (details below): * Careers in the Academy:Mason Program for Ph.D. Students * International Summer School on High-Performance Computing * Seminar:Bioengineering Dept.:Mar 6, 12pm * Ariela Sofer, Edward Huang, and Abbas Zaidi Receive Funding from Pohang University * Arun Sood and Duminda Wijisekera Receive Funding from the Cyber Security Research Alliance *Careers in the Academy:Mason Program for Ph.D. Students* Mason's Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence is now accepting applications for its PROV 701 program, Preparing for Careers in the Academy. This program is geared towards advanced PhD and MFA students who are interested in joining the academic ranks after graduation. URL:http://ctfe.gmu.edu/professional-development/preparing-for-careers-in-the-academy-program/ Deadline:Monday, March 31 *International Summer School on High-Performance Computing* International Summer School 2014 on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences (sponsored by the National Science Foundation) Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Europe, Canada, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the fifth International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be held June 1-6, 2014, in Budapest, Hungary. The summer school is sponsored by the European Union Seventh Framework Program's Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe Implementation Phase project (PRACE-3IP), U.S. National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS), and Compute/Calcul Canada. Leading American, Canadian, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics, including: * Access to EU, U.S., Japanese and Canadian HPC-infrastructures * HPC challenges by discipline (e.g., bioinformatics, computer science, chemistry, and physics) * HPC programming proficiencies * Performance analysis & profiling * Algorithmic approaches & numerical libraries * Data-intensive computing * Scientific visualization The expense-paid program will benefit advanced scholars from European, U.S., Canadian and Japanese institutions who use HPC to conduct research. Interested students should apply by March 9, 2014. Meals, housing, and travel expenses will be paid for the selected participants. Applications from students in all science and engineering fields are welcome. Preference will be given to applicants with parallel programming experience and a research plan that will benefit from the utilization of high performance computing systems. URL: http://www.prace-ri.eu/International-Summer-School-2014 For more information, contact Scott Lathrop (XSEDE) at NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>. *Seminar:Bioengineering Dept.:Mar 6, 12pm* /Title:/Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy: Basic Principles and Applications to Aerospace, Medicine, and Clinical Life-saving Solutions /Speaker:/Hasan Ayaz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Drexel University Thursday, March 6, 2014 12:00 PM ENGR 3507 /Abstract/ Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging brain monitoring technology that relies on optical techniques to detect changes in cortical hemodynamic responses to sensory, motor, or cognitive activation. It was originally developed for clinical monitoring of tissue oxygenation but evolved into a useful tool for neuroimaging studies, and better understanding of human brain function. The fNIRS technology is a portable, safe, affordable and negligibly intrusive system that uses specific wavelengths of light, irradiated through the scalp, to enable noninvasive measurement of localized concentration changes of deoxygenated hemoglobin (deoxy-Hb) and oxygenated hemoglobin (oxy-Hb). Consistent with the neuroergonomic approach, fNIRS sensor can allow capturing brain at work in naturalistic environments during everyday tasks. This presentation will introduce fNIRS technology principles, latest system designs, and signal processing approaches. The second part of the presentation will review our recent fNIRS applications ranging from human computer interaction to medical devices, including cognitive workload assessment of operators, synthetic speech perception (sound quality and neural correlates), brain computer interfaces for control and communication. /Bio/ Hasan Ayaz, PhD is an Assistant Research Professor in Biomedical Engineering. He received his BSc. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bogazici University with high honors and MSc. and PhD degrees in Biomedical Engineering and studied Functional Near Infrared (fNIR) Spectroscopy. Research interests include brain computer interfacing and human performance assessment using optical brain sensors. Experienced in software development, computer graphics, user interface design and embedded system development. * Ariela Sofer, Edward Huang, and Abbas Zaidi Receive Funding from Pohang University* Ariela Sofer, Edward Huang, and Abbas Zaidi of the Systems Engineering & Operations Research Department received $100K from Pohang University of Science and Technology for their project, "A Case Study: Designing an Electric Power Plant Using Model-Based Systems Engineering Techniques." *Arun Sood and Duminda Wijisekera Receive Funding from the Cyber Security Research Alliance* Arun Sood and Duminda Wijisekera of the Computer Science Department and the International Cyber Center received $60K from the Cyber Security Research Alliance for their project, "A Survey and Taxonomy on the Roots of Trust in Cyber-Physical Systems." -- =============================================================== Stephen G. Nash Senior Associate Dean Volgenau School of Engineering George Mason University Nguyen Engineering Building, Room 2500 Mailstop 5C8 Fairfax, VA 22030 [log in to unmask] Phone: (703) 993-1505 Fax: (703) 993-1633 http://volgenau.gmu.edu/web/volgenau/senior-associate-dean