From our initial investigations of the health impacts from exposure to inhaled particles about 100 years ago, new capabilities in characterizing and monitoring exposures are transforming our knowledge base and pointing the way towards new options for mitigating policy and risk assessment. This presentation will review some recent research in this field and highlight where future policy and standards may be pointing.
Presenter: Jeremy Gernand | Energy & Mineral Engineering
Sustainable (or environment-conscious) computing concerns the consumption of compute resources in a way that leads to a net zero impact on the environment. It is a very broad concept that includes not just power/energy but also ecosystems, pollution (e.g., discarded hardware), and natural resources (e.g., water). While reducing power/energy consumption of computing certainly contributes to sustainability, it is only one part of a very complex problem. Specifically, to achieve sustainability, one needs a multipronged strategy, which spans green sourcing, e-waste, regulations, and AI. In this talk, I will introduce the problem as well as its different aspects, and present some promising research directions.
Presenter: Mahmut Kandemir | Computer Science & Engineering
Aerosol particles are ubiquitous in the environment, have complex physicochemical properties, and impact human health and climate. This talk will give a wide overview of research in the area of aerosol chemistry with particular focus on the dynamics of liquid-liquid phase separation in submicron aerosol particles with application to disease transmission, ice nucleation of microplastics and biological particles, and measurement of aerosol acidity through the use of carbon quantum dots.
Physics-based models and purely data-driven machine learning models each have significant benefits and limitations. A new pathway, differentiable modelling, combines the two methods and pushes the boundary of physics-informed machine learning. I will use some examples from water resource research to demonstrate advantages of this combined approach where we have mitigated the limitations of each method, more reliably predicted geohazards like floods, and discovered previously unrecognized physical relationships.
Presenter: Chaopeng Shen | Civil & Environmental Engineering
ChatGPT can craft essays that appear human-made, significantly influencing how liberal arts and humanities are taught and graded. Soon, its impacts will be felt by the world of science and engineering. In this talk, I'll showcase how ChatGPT can produce convincing and thorough reviews of scientific papers and proposals, using my past IEE seed grants as case studies. These AI-generated reviews sound authentic, but it's uncertain if they match the quantitative rankings human experts would provide. Moreover, as ChatGPT reshapes the review process, we face a new challenge: discerning whether reviewers are genuinely offering their expertise or leaning on computer tools. The title and abstract for this talk were generated by ChatGPT 4.
Speaker: Chris Gorski | Civil & Environmental Engineering
The cold universe and the sun are two important renewable energy resources. We have developed a device that can passively cool to about 5 ˚C below the ambient temperature via radiative cooling and generate electricity using sunlight at the same time and same place. I’ll use this example to highlight novel opportunities for harvesting renewable energy sources.
Linxiao Zhu | Mechanical Engineering