March 22, 2012
Trash to Treasure: Fly Ash Reutilization
UK Energy Club* would like to invite you to join us for our next seminar “*Trash to Treasure: Fly Ash Reutilization*.” We’re bringing in Danny Gray, the Executive Vice President of CHARAH Inc., to discuss one of the innovative solutions their company offers for coal combustion by-products.
The seminar will be this *Thursday, March 22nd* *@ 7pm in Student Center 231 *, and is open to anyone that would like to come. We will have free pizza and refreshments.
Charah, Inc. Is a based out of Louisville and is committed to coal combustion product management and power plant support services. As VP, Danny is responsible for Charah’s product sales development, environmental compliance for products, and legislative and regulatory communications. He currently serves on the board of directors of the American Coal Council
(ACC) and on the Energy and Environment Committee of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.
To learn more about the company, you can go to their website via this link:
Hope to see you at the seminar!
Dissertation Defense: Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Theoretical and Empirical Results on Social Choice, Manipulation, and Bribery
Nicholas Mattei is a recipient of The Graduate School’s Myrle E. and Verle D. Nietzel Visiting Distinguished Faculty Award, honoring outstanding dissertations. Dr. Francesca Rossi of the University of Padova, Italy, is the Visiting Distinguished Faculty and will serve as the Graduate School’s outside examiner during the dissertation defense.
Dissertation Title: Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Theoretical and Empirical Results on Social Choice, Manipulation, and Bribery.
Abstract Title: Groups of individuals have always struggled to come to consistent and fair group decisions. Entire fields of study have emerged in economics, psychology, political science, and computer science to deal with the myriad intricacies that emerge when groups attempt to decide. In my PhD work I have sought to gain a deeper understanding of the practical and theoretical shortcomings of existing voting rules and procedures. This dissertation lies within the field of computational social choice, which is a subfield of artificial intelligence. Computational social choice attempts to apply ideas from computer science to the well established field of social choice. This information exchange goes both ways and this cross disciplinary area has broader impacts with the fields of economics, computer science, and political science. My theoretical work focuses the computational complexity of the bribery problem. The bribery problem asks if an outside agent can affect the results of a voting scenario. The key to this question seems to lay in the amount of information the outside agent has access to. In this work I investigate the situation when the outside actor has access to perfect information, uncertain information, and structured information, with respect to the voting agents? preferences. I find that, depending on the structure and type of information, the complexity of the bribery problem can range from computationally easy to computationally intractable. Equally critical to the theoretical aspects of voting are empirical tests of existing assumptions. I have identified a large, sincere source of data with which to test many of the underlying assumptions of social choice. For years a dearth of accurate data has led to many studies of the properties of voting rules to take place in the theoretical domains. With the new dataset, identified as part of my dissertation research, I have been able to test many theoretical voting paradoxes with orders of magnitude more data than is currently available. This work shows that many of the irregularities or paradoxes associated with voting occur very rarely in practice.
March 21, 2012
Colloquium: Preference reasoning and computational social choice
Preference reasoning and computational social choice
Dr. Francesca Rossi, University of Padova, Italy
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 4–5 PM, Marksbury Building Theater
Dr. Rossi’s colloquium is made possible by a grant from the The Myrle E. and Verle D. Nietzel Visiting Distinguished Faculty Endowment, a program of the University of Kentucky Graduate School.
Abstract:
Preferences are ubiquitous in everyday decision making. They should therefore be an essential ingredient in every reasoning tool. Preferences are often used in collective decision making, where each agent expresses its preferences over a set of possible decisions, and a chair aggregates such preferences to come out with the “winning” decision. Indeed, preference reasoning and multi-agent preference aggregations are areas of growing interest within artificial intelligence.
Preferences have classically been the subject also of social choice studies, in particular those related to elections and voting theory. In this context, several voters express their preferences over the candidates and a voting rule is used to elect the winning candidate. Economists, political theorist, mathematicians, as well as philosophers, have made tremendous efforts to study this scenario and have obtained many theoretical results about the properties of the voting rules that one can use.
Since, after all, this scenario is not so different from multi-agent decision making, it is not surprising that in recent years the area of multi-agent systems has been invaded by interesting papers trying to adapt social choice results to multi-agent setting. An adaptation is indeed necessary, since, besides the apparent similarity, there are many issues in multi-agent settings that do not occur in a social choice context: a large set of candidates with a combinatorial structure, several formalisms to model preferences compactly, preference orderings including indifference and incomparability, uncertainty, as well as computational concerns.
The above considerations are the basis of a relatively new research area called computational social choice, which studies how social choice and AI can fruitfully cooperate to give innovative and improved solutions to aggregating preferences given by multiple agents. This talk will present this interdisciplinary area of research and will present several recent results regarding some of the issues mentioned above.
Bio:
Francesca Rossi is a full professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy. Her research interests include constraint reasoning, preference modelling and aggregation, multi-agent systems, and computational social choice. She has been president of the international association for constraint programming (ACP) from 2003 to 2007, she is an IJCAI trustee since 2009 and an ECCAI fellow since 2008. She has been program chair of CP 2003 and she will be program chair of IJCAI 2013. She is a member of the advisory board of JAIR, a column editor for the Journal of Logic and Computation, and a member of the editorial board of Constraints, Artificial Intelligence, JAIR, AMAI, and KAIS. She has published more than 130 papers and one book. She co-edited 16 volumes, between special issues, conference proceedings, and the handbook of constraint programming.
March 19, 2012
Department of Mechanical Engineering William Maxwell Reed Seminar
Mysteries and Conundra in the Meaning and Use of Physical Dimensions
Dennis S. Bernstein, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
For more information, see:
http://www.engr.uky.edu/me/files/2012/03/Bernstein-3-19-12.pdf
March 10, 2012
PLTWKY 2012 Mars Rover Challenge
Statewide Mars Rover competition for fifth graders within Project Lead The Way districts across the Commonwealth. Curiosity, the Rover launched in November, is travelling to Mars, scheduled for landing in August 2012. The fifth grade students within Project Lead The Way school districts of the Commonwealth will convene in the UK NASA Lab on March 10, 2012 to challenge other fifth-graders. These Kentucky-based remote-controlled Rovers are constructed entirely of cardboard and hot glue. Students compete in teams of 5 in a double-elimination tournament on campus. Local elementary school competitions determine which teams travel to Lexington. Sponsored by Lockheed Martin.
March 9, 2012
William and Patricia Stacy Engineering Ethics Education Lecture
Friday, March 9, Dr. Loui will be presenting a lunchtime seminar to all of electrical and computer engineering graduate students at 12 Noon in 323 CRMS. His presentation will be on research ethics, including plagiarism.
Dr. Loui’s research interests include computational complexity theory, ethics in engineering and computing, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. He serves as executive editor of College Teaching, and as a member of the editorial board of Accountability in Research. He is a Carnegie Scholar and an IEEE Fellow. Dr. Loui has produced two half-hour movies that dramatize case studies in engineering ethics. He mentors students for the Leadership Certificate Program and conducts short programs across the campus of UIUC on engineering ethics, research ethics, and college teaching.
March 8, 2012
William and Patricia Stacy Engineering Ethics Education Lecture
Thursday, March 8, Dr. Michael Loui, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be presenting the William and Patricia Stacy Engineering Ethics Education Lecture to the ECE Capstone Senior Design Class (3:30-5:00) in Room 357 FPAT. This is a required class for all seniors in electrical and computer engineering and will be on workplace ethics.
March 5, 2012
FE Review – Math
This FE Review session will be given by Dr. Demlow on the subject of Math at 6:30PM in room 112 of Raymond (OHR). Free pizza will be provided!
Attend these sessions and expand your horizons! Whether you are preparing for the FE Exam or just want to know a little more about all things engineering, these sessions will have valuable information from respected professors in several engineering disciplines.
Sophomores and Juniors, get a head start and find out what you need to know for the FE Exam!
Department of Mechanical Engineering William Maxwell Reed Seminar
A short review of ablative-material response models and simulation tools.
Jean Lachaud, Ph.D., Associate Scientist, University of California, Santa Cruz
http://www.engr.uky.edu/me/files/2012/02/Lachaud-3-5-12.pdf