בית הספר להנדסת חשמל ומחשבים | אוניברסיטת תל אביב

סמינר מחלקתי ביה"ס להנדסה מכאנית Prof. Sabrina Spatari

21 בדצמבר 2016, 14:00

וולפסון 206

סמינר מחלקתי ביה"ס להנדסה מכאנית Prof. Sabrina Spatari

School of Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 at 14:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206

Opportunities for carbon abatement through development of biomass-to-bioenergy pathways

Prof. Sabrina Spatari

Associate Professor, Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA, spatari@drexel.edu

Visiting Professor, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Biofuels are currently under development to meet policy goals for diversifying energy supply, reducing the carbon-intensity of transportation and other sectors, and stimulating growth in rural economies. Countries around the world including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK have developed renewable and low carbon fuel policies to incentivize transport fuels derived from biomass into the market. At present biological and thermochemical technologies are under development at laboratory and pilot scale to investigate the technological needs and economics of scaling biofuels and value-added co-products. Ethanol, higher alcohols, and fully infrastructure compatible fuels (with 0% oxygen – physically and chemically similar to current petroleum based fuels) are being developed at different scales, including small (farm) scale (up to 200 dry metric tons/day) and industrial scale (2000 dry metric tons/day and higher) to utilize diverse sources of lignocellulose. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for evaluating the environmental performance of biofuels and biomaterials emerging through R&D, and a necessary tool for developing and judging the compliance of those biofuels and value-added co-products under low carbon fuel standards. This presentation investigates technological, environmental, and energy and resource impacts of a set of emerging lignocellulose-based biofuels from biological and thermochemical technologies at different scales using statistically based LCA methods. Uncertainties that stem from technological performance in the near and medium terms are characterized. This presentation will further highlight how analytical models for understanding the full set of environmental tradeoffs associated with emerging biofuel technologies are essential inputs to guiding policy and commercial enterprise decision making for improving the overall sustainability of transportation energy supply.

Bio for Sabrin

Dr. Sabrina Spatari’s research and expertise focuses on the development and application of life cycle assessment (LCA) and other systems analysis methods for guiding engineering decision making and public policy. Her specific interests include industrial ecology, biomass and bioenergy, biofuels, and urban infrastructure. Dr. Spatari studied Chemical Engineering and received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto. She is currently Associate Professor in Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia and Visiting Professor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Her research on biomass resources and renewable energy extends to multiple U.S. and international projects, including in Uruguay and Israel. She has been an invited speaker on biofuel and LCA of early stage biomass conversion technology at the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering meeting and the Gordon Research Seminar on Industrial Ecology. In 2014 she was the recipient of Drexel University’s Louis and Bessie Stein Family Fellowship.

SABRINA SPATARI

Drexel University, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering,

3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Phone: (215) 571-3557 · Fax: (215) 895-1363 · email: spatari@drexel.edu

PROFESSIONAL PREPARATION

University of Toronto Chemical Engineering B.A.Sc., 1995

University of Michigan Chemical Engineering (M.S.E), 1998

Yale University Sch. Forestry and Env. Studies Research Engineer, 2000-02

University of Toronto Civil Engineering Ph.D., 2007

University of California, Berkeley Postdoctoral Scholar 2007-08

Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario, Canada, 2003-present

APPOINTMENTS

January 2009-present Assistant Professor Department of Civil, Environmental and

Architectural Engineering, Drexel University

selected Honors and Awards

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canada PDF (2007-09); PGS (2003-04)

Research Interests

My research concentrates on developing and applying systems analysis methods, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) to support decision-making for engineered systems. I am interested in applying these methods toward the development of sustainable infrastructure systems including, energy provision in transportation and power utilities, and asset management.

SYNERGISTIC ACTIVITIES

Founding member of the ISIE Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA) topical section committee
My research on winter cropping systems informed policy makers on advanced fuel feedstocks for EPA’s RFS2 standard (2009-10)
Consultant to USDA-FAS on LCA of energy crops for biofuels and power in Uruguay, 2012-2013
Expert Declarant to the State of California Attorney General’s Office on Advanced biofuels and Life Cycle-based Policy Making, December 2010
Invited speaker, NAE Frontiers of Engineering, German-US on Biomass Conversion, 2013
Invited participant, NAE Frontiers of Engineering, US-EU Meeting on Materials Ecology, 2010
Manuscript reviewer for: Atmospheric Environment, Biomass and Bioenergy, Bioresource Technology, Environ. Sci. Technol., J. Industrial Ecology, I.J. LCA 2000-present.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Pourhashem, G.; Spatari, S.; Boateng, A. A.; McAloon, A.; Mullen, C. A., Life Cycle Environmental and Economic Tradeoffs of Using Fast Pyroysis Products for Power Generation. Energy & Fuels 2013.

Spatari, S.; MacLean, H. L., Characterizing Model Uncertainties in the Life Cycle of Lignocellulose-Based Ethanol Fuels. Environmental Science & Technology 2010, 44, (22), 8773-8780.

Spatari, S.; Bagley, D. M.; MacLean, H. L., Life cycle evaluation of emerging lignocellulosic ethanol conversion technologies. Bioresource Technology 2010, 101, (2), 654-667.

Spatari, S.; Zhang, Y. M.; MacLean, H. L., Life cycle assessment of switchgrass- and corn stover-derived ethanol-fueled automobiles. Environmental Science & Technology 2005, 39, (24), 9750-9758.

Yeh, S.; Jordaan, S. M.; Brandt, A. R.; Turetsky, M. R.; Spatari, S.; Keith, D. W., Land Use Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Conventional Oil Production and Oil Sands. Environmental Science & Technology 2010, 44, (22), 8766-8772.

MacLean, H. L.; Spatari, S., The contribution of enzymes and process chemicals to the life cycle of ethanol. Environmental Research Letters 2009, (1), 014001.

SABRINA SPATARI

Drexel University, Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering,

3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Phone: (215) 571-3557 · Fax: (215) 895-1363 · email: spatari@drexel.edu

PROFESSIONAL PREPARATION

University of Toronto Chemical Engineering B.A.Sc., 1995

University of Michigan Chemical Engineering (M.S.E), 1998

Yale University Sch. Forestry and Env. Studies Research Engineer, 2000-02

University of Toronto Civil Engineering Ph.D., 2007

University of California, Berkeley Postdoctoral Scholar 2007-08

Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario, Canada, 2003-present

APPOINTMENTS

January 2009-present Assistant Professor Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, Drexel University

selected Honors and Awards

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canada PDF (2007-09); PGS (2003-04)

Research Interests

SYNERGISTIC ACTIVITIES

Founding member of the ISIE Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA) topical section committee
My research on winter cropping systems informed policy makers on advanced fuel feedstocks for EPA’s RFS2 standard (2009-10)
Consultant to USDA-FAS on LCA of energy crops for biofuels and power in Uruguay, 2012-2013
Expert Declarant to the State of California Attorney General’s Office on Advanced biofuels and Life Cycle-based Policy Making, December 2010
Invited speaker, NAE Frontiers of Engineering, German-US on Biomass Conversion, 2013
Invited participant, NAE Frontiers of Engineering, US-EU Meeting on Materials Ecology, 2010
Manuscript reviewer for: Atmospheric Environment, Biomass and Bioenergy, Bioresource Technology, Environ. Sci. Technol., J. Industrial Ecology, I.J. LCA 2000-present.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Pourhashem, G.; Spatari, S.; Boateng, A. A.; McAloon, A.; Mullen, C. A., Life Cycle Environmental and Economic Tradeoffs of Using Fast Pyroysis Products for Power Generation. Energy & Fuels 2013.

Spatari, S.; MacLean, H. L., Characterizing Model Uncertainties in the Life Cycle of Lignocellulose-Based Ethanol Fuels. Environmental Science & Technology 2010, 44, (22), 8773-8780.

Spatari, S.; Bagley, D. M.; MacLean, H. L., Life cycle evaluation of emerging lignocellulosic ethanol conversion technologies. Bioresource Technology 2010, 101, (2), 654-667.

Spatari, S.; Zhang, Y. M.; MacLean, H. L., Life cycle assessment of switchgrass- and corn stover-derived ethanol-fueled automobiles. Environmental Science & Technology 2005, 39, (24), 9750-9758.

MacLean, H. L.; Spatari, S., The contribution of enzymes and process chemicals to the life cycle of ethanol. Environmental Research Letters 2009, (1), 014001.

a Spatari

הרצאת אורח של -אילת לסמן במחלקה להנדסה ביו רפואית

18 בדצמבר 2016, 15:00

Biomechanical interaction between cells and their non-linear elastic environment

Ayelet Lesman

Biomedical Engineering TAU

Biological cells are able to apply, sense and respond to mechanical forces which can influence their function. Cells also live in environments that exhibit unique mechanical properties with nonlinear elasticity. In my new biomechanics laboratory at TAU Mechanical Engineering (www.lesmanlab.com), we seek to understand how such mechanical factors direct cells toward defined fates and organizations. In this talk, I will present our experimental and computational efforts to quantify the cell-induced deformations, strains, and stresses throughout three-dimensional nonlinear elastic environments during various biological processes including cell division, invasion and cell-cell interaction. Our research efforts allow to understand and predict the mechanical factors that direct and control cell function which can be utilized to direct tissue-level organization and function for regenerative medicine applications.

ההרצאה תתקיים ביום ראשון 18.12.16, בשעה 15:00

בחדר 315, הבניין הרב תחומי, אוניברסיטת תל אביב

07 דצמבר 2016

ידיעות נוספות בנושא

EE Seminar: Dynamic beamforming and steering in echolocating bats

Speaker: Amir Zviran

M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Anthony J. Weiss and Dr. Yossi Yovel

Wednesday, December 14^th, 2016 at 15:30

Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Dynamic beamforming and steering in echolocating bats

Abstract

Echoloating bats emit ultrasonic pulses and anlyze the received echoes to perceive their environment. The spatial distribution of the pulse's energy, also known as beamforming, determines the bat's biosonar field of view. By shifting its acoustic gaze and narrowing its beam, the bat may focus its attention on an object of interest.

In this work we tested the beam forming and steering of the mouth-emitting Pipistrellus kuhlii bat as it was searching and approaching its target. Using audio recordings from a microphone array and data collected from our state-of-the-art IR tracking system, we reconstructed the bat's beam shape and direction and made several interesting conclusions about its dynamic beamforming and steering behavior.

In addition, we compared our results with those anticipated by "the piston model", the most commonly used model for approximating the beam's shape of mouth-emitting bats.

14 בדצמבר 2016, 15:30

חדר 011, בניין כיתות-חשמל

סמינר מחלקתי

Personalized Information Sharing: Reducing Coordination Overhead in Loosely-Coupled Teamwork
Dr. Ofra Amir – Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

ABSTRACT:

Teamwork is a core human activity, essential to progress in many areas. A vast body of research in the social sciences and in computer science has studied teamwork and developed tools to support teamwork. Although the technologies resulting from this work have enabled teams to work together more effectively in many settings, they have proved inadequate for supporting the coordination of distributed teams that operate in a loosely-coupled manner. In this talk, I will present three integrated research efforts towards developing intelligent systems that reduce coordination overhead in such teams: an in depth formative study of complex healthcare teams, the design of new computational methods for efficiently sharing information with team members, and an evaluation of those methods in a realistic teamwork setting.

The study of complex healthcare teams revealed new coordination challenges in loosely-coupled teamwork. Based these findings, we propose a new approach that aims to reduce information overload while ensuring that team members have sufficient awareness of others’ activities by personalizing the information shared with different team members. Specifically, we developed a new representation, Mutual Influence Potential Networks, that implicitly learns collaboration patterns and dependencies among activities from team members’ interactions, and MIP-DOI, an algorithm that uses this representation to determine the information that is most relevant to each team member. We implemented a system that used MIP-DOI to personalize information sharing in the context of collaborative writing. An evaluation of this system showed that personalized information sharing resulted in higher productivity and reduced perceived workload of team members compared to indiscriminate sharing of changes, without detrimental effects on the quality of the team’s work.

Bio: Ofra Amir completed her PhD at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She holds a BSc and MSc in Information Systems Engineering, both from Ben-Gurion University. Ofra’s research combines AI and HCI methods to develop intelligent systems that support people in domains such as education and healthcare. Her work has won the second place in the 2013 Computing Community Consortium/AAMAS Challenges and Visions Track and an honorable mention in ACM CHI’15, and was a finalist for the CIMIT student technology in healthcare prize. She is a recipient of a Siebel Scholarship.

13 בדצמבר 2016, 14:00

חדר 206 בניין וולפסון

סמינר מחלקתי בי"ס להנדסה מכאנית Prof. Victor Shrira

19 בדצמבר 2016, 14:00

וולפסון 206

סמינר מחלקתי בי"ס להנדסה מכאנית Prof. Victor Shrira

Mortimer and Raymond Sackler

Institute of Advanced Studies

המכון ללימודים מתקדמים

ע"ש מורטימר וריימונד סאקלר

Prof. Victor Shrira

Department of Mathematics

Keele University

United Kingdom

פרופסור ויקטור שרירה
המחלקה למתמטיקה
אוניברסיטת קיל
בריטניה

Mechanical Engineering Seminar

סמינר הנדסה מכנית

KINETIC EQUATIONS VS DIRECT NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF WEAKLY NONLINEAR RANDOM WAVE FIELDS:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE KINETIC EQUATIONS?

The challenge of describing evolution of random weakly nonlinear dispersive waves in fluids and solids in various contexts is a major open fundamental problem despite being intensively studied theoretically and experimentally for more than fifty years. In contrast to the classical hydrodynamic turbulence, there is a well-established general formalism for treating weakly nonlinear wave fields that exploits smallness of nonlinearity and subtle assumptions about quasi-Gaussianity of a statistically homogeneous wave field. This approach leads to a closed equation for the second statistical momenta of the field which called the kinetic equation (KE). Although the theory based upon the KE has been able to predict the major features of wave field evolution and is widely used. However the basic question --- to what extent the theory captures the actual behavior of the wave field --- remains open. Here we address it by performing a detailed comparison of predictions of the KE and its generalization (gKE) with the results of direct numerical simulations (DNS) employing the algorithm specially designed for long term evolution of random weakly nonlinear wave fields. For certainty and without much loss of generality we perform these comparisons for weakly nonlinear water waves.

To make the comparisons maximally clean and simple and retain as much generality as possible we do the following. We take as the starting point the equations of motion in the form of the "four-wave" Zakharov equation without forcing. The KE and gKE are derived from the this Zakharov equation under an assumption of weak non-Gausianity of the wave field and a closure hypothesis for the field higher statistical moments. We simulate numerically long-term evolution of wave spectra without forcing using three different models: (i) the classical kinetic equation (KE); (ii) the generalized kinetic equation (gKE) valid also when the wave spectrum is changing rapidly; (iii) the DNS based on the Zakharov integrodifferential equation for water wave which does not rely on any statistical assumptions. As the initial conditions we choose two spectra with the same frequency distribution and different degrees of directionality. All three approaches demonstrate very close evolution of integral characteristics of spectra. Theoretically predicted regimes and asympotics do occur. However, there are substantial systematic differences (e.g. the broadening of angular spectra is much faster for the kinetic equations, the shape of the spectra are also noticeably different), which suggests the presence and significance of coherent interactions not accounted for by the established closure for the kinetic equations. This implies that the fundamental issue of closure for random wave fields has to be revisited.

The lecture will be held on Monday,
19 December 2016, at 14:00, Hall 206,
Wolfson Mechanical Engineering Building,
Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv

ההרצאה תתקיים ביום שני,
19 בדצמבר 2016, בשעה 14:00,
אולם 206, בניין וולפסון להנדסה מכנית,
אוניברסיטת תל-אביב, רמת-אביב

Geosciences Colloquium

קולוקוויום מדעי כדור הארץ

INERTIAL WAVES AND DEEP OCEAN MIXING

אוניברסיטת תל-אביב, רמת-אביב

05 דצמבר 2016

ידיעות נוספות בנושא

EE Seminar: Computing with Strategic Agents and Uncertainty

(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker: Dr. Inbal Talgam Cohen
School of Computer Science & Engineering, Hebrew University

Monday, December 12^th, 2016
15:00 - 16:00

Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Computing with Strategic Agents and Uncertainty

Abstract

A centralized algorithm with perfect information can reach an efficient solution in engineering applications such as network routing, allocation of wireless spectrum, or matching jobs to machines on the cloud. Modern engineering and economic algorithms, though, face more demanding settings - algorithm input is not fully specified and the algorithm must interact with self-interested agents (for example, users with traffic demands in a communication network). In these cases, algorithm design faces new and fundamental challenges.
In this talk I will demonstrate how my research tackles these challenges, using ideas from combinatoric optimization, probability, game theory and economics. A particularly powerful idea for aligning agents’ incentives, which is heavily used in practice, is pricing (for example, consider for-profit cloud computing services). I will discuss algorithmic pricing questions that have been open for over three decades, and how these “reduce” to well-understood and classic resource allocation problems by applying a resource augmentation approach [Sleator-Tarjan’84].

Bio

Inbal Talgam-Cohen is a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at HUJI and a visiting postdoctoral researcher at TAU. She holds a PhD from Stanford (2015) supervised by Tim Roughgarden, an MSc from Weizmann and a BSc from TAU in computer science, as well as a law LLB. Her research is in algorithms and computational complexity with applications to game theory. Her awards include Best Doctoral Dissertation Award of ACM SIGecom, the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, and the Best Student Paper Award at EC’15.‏

12 בדצמבר 2016, 15:00

חדר 011, בניין כיתות-חשמל

EE SEminar: Spatially Coupled LDLC: New Constructions

Speaker: Svetlana Reznikov

M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Meir Feder

Wednesday, December 14th, 2016 at 15:00

Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Spatially Coupled LDLC: New Constructions

Low density lattice codes (LDLCs) are designed directly in the Euclidean space. These codes are shown by simulation to approach the Poltyrev capacity. The LDLC uses a lattice with a sparse inverse matrix, which allows a linear complexity decoding. A parametric decoding algorithm makes the memory usage efficient and lowers the computation complexity.

Spatially coupled low density lattice codes (SC-LDLCs) discussed in this talk provide a coded modulation scheme which has a smaller Symbol Error Rate (SER) then the LDLC scheme for every tested block length . These codes are built by coupling some LDLCs, so they also have sparse inverse matrices and the advantages of the LDLC apply to them as well.

In this talk, some new constructions of the spatially coupled low density lattice codes are introduced. All the constructions are decoded using the parametric decoder.

14 בדצמבר 2016, 15:00

חדר 011, בניין כיתות-חשמל

סמינר מחלקתי

Robust and Simple Market Design

Dr. Inbal Talgam Cohen – The Hebrew University

ABSTRACT:

Algorithms and the Internet are revolutionizing how society allocates its resources. Examples range from wireless spectrum and electricity to online advertising and carpooling opportunities. A fundamental question is how to allocate such resources efficiently by designing robust computational markets.

In this talk I will demonstrate recent progress on this question by considering a problem crucial for major industry players like Google: how to design revenue-maximizing allocation mechanisms. Most existing designs hinge on “getting the price right” – selling goods to buyers at prices low enough to encourage a sale, but high enough to garner non-trivial revenue. This approach is difficult to implement when the seller has little or no a priori information about buyers’ valuations, or when the setting is sufficiently complex, as in the case of markets with heterogeneous goods.

I will show a robust approach to designing auctions for revenue, which “lets the market do the work” by allowing prices to emerge from enhanced competition for scarce goods. This work provides guidelines for a seller in choosing among data acquisition and sophisticated pricing, and investment in drawing additional buyers.

Bio: Inbal Talgam-Cohen is a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at HUJI and a visiting postdoctoral researcher at TAU. She holds a PhD from Stanford (2015) supervised by Tim Roughgarden, an MSc from Weizmann and a BSc from TAU in computer science, as well as a law LLB. Her research is in algorithmic game theory, including computational and data aspects of market design and applications to Internet economics. Her awards include Best Doctoral Dissertation Award of ACM SIGecom, the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, and the Best Student Paper Award at EC’15.

06 בדצמבר 2016, 14:00

חדר 206 בניין וולפסון

Biomechanical interaction between cells and their non-linear elastic environment

Ayelet Lesman

Biomedical Engineering TAU

בוא לקבל נסיון מעשי בזמן התואר, כאן באוניברסיטה!

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