From targeted therapeutics for cancer treatment to enhanced storage systems for clean and renewable energy, nanotechnology promises to enable solutions to some of humankind's greatest challenges. Despite this promise, the use of engineered nanomaterials in commerce poses uncertain risks that have drawn criticism from consumer groups, skepticism from the scientific community, and scrutiny from federal regulatory agencies. The speaker will discuss emerging applications of nanotechnology in consumer products, and describe efforts underway at Virginia Tech and elsewhere to better understand and minimize human and environmental health and safety risks of nanoscale materials.

Yong Cao is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He has worked at a leading video game company, Electronic Arts, before joined Virginia Tech in 2007. Dr. Cao is the Director of the Graphics and Visualization Lab at Virginia Tech, which focuses on the research of high performance visualization and simulation, parallel computing on many-core architecture, character animation, and video game based learning. In this talk, I will describe the technical challenges and solutions for visualizing and analyzing massive datasets, including images, videos, volumetric data, geometry data, and graphs. The focus will be on the research of parallel algorithm design on many-core architectures, especially GPGPUs.

Dr. Jeffrey Reed is the Willis G. Worcester professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the director of Wireless at Virginia Tech. Dr. Reed’s areas of expertise are in software radios, smart antennas, and ultra wideband. A new paradigm is headed for managing spectrum, it is as fundamental change to managing spectrum since the spark-gap generator radio was outlawed in the 1930s. This new management technique, based on cognitive techniques, will greatly expand the availability of spectrum for supporting high data rate transmissions and open up new applications that can use the spectrum.

Providing Open Access to scholarly content helps to further scientific and creative progress through the timely exchange of information, provides researchers with a means of curating their scholarly identities on the open web, and enhances the visibility of research data and digital scholarship. Join us to learn more about OA, the value of disseminating digital research as widely as possible, and about changes in research environments and scholarly communications brought on by a variety of legal, financial, and economic factors

R. Benjamin Knapp is the Director of the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) and Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech University. ICAT seeks to promote research and education at the boundaries between art, design, engineering, and science. For more than 20 years, Knapp has been working to create meaningful links between human-computer interaction, universal design, and various forms of creativity. His research on human-computer interaction has focused on the development and design of user-interfaces and software that allow both composers and performers to augment the physical control of a musical instrument with direct sensory interaction. Knapp also leads the Music, Sensors, and Emotion research group, with researchers in the UK and the US.