Jasprit Singh Seminar

Professor Jasprit Singh from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor, discussed how technology can be used to bring harmony to our lives. In today’s age of “knowledge abundance” a key challenge is to bring harmony between knowledge and action. Our modern age may be called the age of mindfulness where lack of mindfulness is reflected in the gap between resources, knowledge and action. Human consumption has never been higher but more than a third of human actions worldwide are taken to undo our previous actions. This represents the “Carnot efficiency” of modern life. The obesity crisis, the environmental crisis as well as global economic crisis are not primarily due to a lack of knowledge or resources but due to our inability to act on what we know and want.
What role can technology play to harmonize what we know, what we want and what we do? What kinds of sensors and devices are needed for making this happen? In this talk I will describe some of the potential roles technology can play in acting as a “mentor” in our life. In particular I will describe our work on mobile “mentor platforms” and describe the potential role of new materials and sensors that could be integrated in mobile or wearable devices.

Peter Voorhees Seminar

Professor Voorhees of Northwestern University’s Department of Materials Science came to the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana to discuss his research into vapor-liquid-solid nanowire growth. Faculty and students, alike learned new techniques and analysis methods. His group used video-rate lattice-resolved environmental transmission electron microscopy to show in-situ the nanowire growth interface during growth. He found that, due to the nanowire geometry, a single twin boundary is located at the nanowire center. This twin acts as a preferential nucleation site from which the nanowire grows. He also discussed a model that he used to demonstrate the manner in which the catalyst droplet becomes unstable and compared the predictions of this simulation to experimental observations.