UB and the Don Davis Auto World Lectureship
Fund are presenting the 2001-02 series. The Student Association is the
series sponsor. The School of Management Alumni Association will sponsor
Burns' lecture.
Tickets are available at the CFA box
office from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and at all TicketMaster
locations. Ticket prices range from $20 to $28 for the UB community.
A compelling storyteller, Burns created
"Baseball" (1994), "Thomas Jefferson" (1996), "The West" (1996), "Frank
Lloyd Wright" (1998, with Lynn Novick) and JAZZ (2000), in addition
to the Civil War series on PBS.
"JAZZ" was Burns' third epic documentary,
a 10-part production that follows this most American of art forms from
its origins in blues and ragtime through swing, bebop and fusion. As
in all his series, Burns explores in detail the culture, politics and
dreams that gave birth to this most integral part of American history
and life.
Applicants sought
for DOD scholarships
Undergraduate and graduate students seeking degrees and graduate certificates
in information assurance disciplines may apply for scholarship support
from the U.S. Department of Defense.
UB students are eligible to apply for
the scholarships because the university has been designated as a Center
of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAEIAE) by
the National Security Agency.
Information assurance encompasses the
scientific, technical and management disciplines required to ensure
computer and network security.
The scholarship pays the full cost of
tuition, fees, books, lab expenses and supplies and equipment. Undergraduate
scholarship winners also will receive a stipend of $10,000, while graduate
students will receive $15,000 stipends.
The full application package can be
downloaded at www.cse.buffalo.edu/caeiae/News/2002/03/27/AttachmentDvacancy.doc.
The deadline for applications is April
18. Awards will be announced in late May or early June, with grants
being awarded in June.
For further information, contact Shambhu
J. Upadhyaya, associate professor of computer science and engineering,
at 645-3180, ext. 133, or shambhu@cse.buffalo.edu.
Workshop to address
promotion, tenure
The Association of Women Full Professors and the Institute for Research
and Education on Women and Gender will present an informational workshop,
"The PRB and How It Works," from 10-11:30 a.m. Wednesday in 567 Capen
Hall, North Campus.
Suzanne Laychock, senior associate dean
for research and biomedical education in the School of Medicine and
Biological Sciences and a former chair of the President's Review Board,
will lead the workshop.
The session, which should be of particular
interest to junior faculty, will provide an overview of the PRB and
the promotion process at UB.
For further information, contact IREWG
at 829-3451.
Women in Higher Ed
to meet
Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi will give the keynote address at the annual
conference of the Western New York Network for Women Leaders in Higher
Education, to be held April 26 in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus.
The theme of the conference is "Why
Do We Like the Foods We Like: The Good, the Bad and the Fattening."
The program will include the presentation
of the Bernice Poss Award, given annually to an outstanding woman in
higher education, to Marsha D. Jackson, associate vice president for
student affairs at Erie Community College.
Capaldi, who served as provost of the
University of Florida before coming to UB in 2000, is an expert in the
psychology of eating. Her research interests focus on why we like the
foods we eat, or more generally, how motivation can be learned. She
has contributed more than 60 chapters, articles and books to the literature,
co-authored an introductory psychology textbook and edited two books.
Following Capaldi's lecture, participants
will break into "round-table" discussion groups to examine the conference
theme and how it applies to their professional and personal lives
The conference will open with registration
at 8:30 a.m. Capaldi will speak at 9:30 a.m., and the "round tables"
are scheduled from 10:30-11:15 a.m. A question-and-answer session with
Capaldi will follow. The PossAward will be presented during the luncheon,
which is set to begin at noon.
For more information about the conference
or to register, contact Judy Wollard at 286 8423, or jaw@niagara.edu.
Earth Day colloquium
to be held
Ecologist and author Sandra Steingraber and Germaine Buck, chief of
the Epidemiology Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development, will be the keynote speakers at the Earth Day Environmental
Science Colloquium, to be held April 19 in the atrium and Screening
Room of the Center for the Arts, North Campus.
The colloquium is sponsored by the Environment
and Society Institute, the Environmental Health Sciences Graduate Group,
the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the Environmental Studies
Interdisciplinary Degree Program and UB Green.
Buck, a former associate professor of
social and preventive medicine at UB, will speak at 10:30 a.m. in the
Screening Room. Steingraber, an internationally recognized expert on
environmental links to cancer, will speak at 1:30 p.m. in the Screening
Room. She also will speak at 7 p.m. April 18 in the Allen Hall Theatre,
South Campus. That appearance, sponsored by WBFO 88.7 FM in conjunction
with the Environment and Society Institute and the Presbytery of Western
New York, will be free and open to the public.
Buck, who received master's and doctoral
degrees from UB, joined the NIH in September 2000. She is particularly
interested in parental environmental exposures and their effects on
human reproduction and development, as well as novel methodologies for
advancing epidemiologic study of these endpoints.
Steingraber, dubbed "the new Rachel
Carson" by the Sierra Club, is the author of "Living Downstream: An
Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment," a highly acclaimed book
that presents cancer as a human rights issue.
For further information, contact Ann
B. Salter at salter@acsu.buffalo.edu.
Hawley to discuss
"thinking shoes"
Michael Hawley believes that your shoes soon will be doing some serious
thinking on your behalf. And they'll be joined in their cognitive powers
by your furniture, clothing, appliances, doors and automobile, says
Hawley, Dreyfoos Professor of Media Technology at MIT and director of
a project called "Things That Think."
Hawley will deliver the inaugural lecture
at the AT&T Informatics Lecture Series at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the
Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts, North Campus. The lecture,
which will be free of charge and open to the public, is entitled "Creating
Things That Think."
So, what will your shoes think about?
A whole lot, Hawley says. Virtually all of your vital signs—heart
rate, body temperature, blood pressure and so on—can be tracked
through the soles of your feet. In the not-very-distant future, it will
be feasible, Hawley says, to send that information directly to your
doctor's office or to a home computer that can assess it on your behalf.
Your shoes will know your health—and what to do about it—before
you do. And long before your traditional doctor ever would.
The revolutionary aspect of thinking
shoes and of many of the other applications being pioneered at "Things
That Think" is that computer power will be harnessed to serve people's
needs in ways that we quickly will take for granted, Hawley says, because
they will be integrated into our lives to meet real needs in unobtrusive
ways. However, he adds, they will turn existing systems and societal
structures inside out as they offer the long-promised power of information
to individuals.
The lecture series is being funded as
part of a $250,000 grant to the School of Informatics from AT&T to support
curriculum development for a 36-credit-hour interdisciplinary master's
degree in information and communication that will prepare students to
enter the information workforce by mixing theory with practical experience.
Miller to perform
in "Slightly Bent"
Rick Miller, multi-talented performer and star of last season's hit
show "MacHomer," will return to the Center for the Arts on April 26
with his new show, "Slightly Bent."
Miller's one-man show, part of the Off
Center Series sponsored by the Student Association, will be presented
at 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. in the Mainstage theater. Series media sponsor
is WBFO.
"Slightly Bent" is a multi-media, comedic
extravaganza, featuring more than 150 characters and just about everything
Miller can do in 65 minutes. Live sketches make up the bulk of the performance,
and the story is told through connected video segments featuring the
protagonist in search of ideas to justify his chosen show title, "Slightly
Bent."
Tickets for "Slightly Bent" are $8 in
advance and $10 day of performance, and are available at the CFA box
office from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and at all Ticketmaster
locations.
Leon to discuss environmental
issues
Warren Leon, executive director of the Northeast Sustainable Energy
Association, will speak about environmental issues during appearances
today at UB.
He will discuss "Your Most Important
Environmental Choices" at noon at 120 Clemens Hall, North Campus, and
"Energy, National Security and the Environment," at 7:30 p.m. in the
theater in Allen Hall, South Campus.
The lectures are sponsored by the UB
Green Office and the Western New York Sustainable Energy Association.
For more information, contact the UB
Green Office at 829-3535.
Black masculinity
to be topic of conference
The Law School's Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy will sponsor
a conference examining the African-American male experience from the
perspective of popular culture, crime and punishment, religion, work,
sexuality and parenting.
Titled "Exploring, Constructing and
Sustaining Progressive Black Masculinities," the conference will be
held tomorrow through Sunday in 280 Park Hall, North Campus. Buffalo
State College is co-sponsor of the event.
A keynote address by best-selling author
Michael Eric Dyson, Ida B. Well-Barnett University Professor at DePaul
University, will be held at 8 p.m. tomorrow in the auditorium of the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo. Admission is
free, but seating is limited.
For more information on the conference,
contact Athena Mutua at 645-2873 or by email at admutua@buffalo.edu.
Additional information also is available at www.law.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/currentblk02.html.
Approach protects
connections
When a link or node in a high-speed computer network goes down as the
result of a software bug, hardware failure, an error by construction
workers or even a natural disaster, mission-critical operations—such
as telemedicine and financial or national security transactions on the
Internet—can be severely jeopardized in seconds.
Companies that provide network services
protect their institutional clients, such as large corporations and
government labs, from these consequences by establishing backup connections
in their networks.
But many existing schemes require significant
amounts of bandwidth, leaving less available for carrying out the critical
operations they are designed to support. Other systems that chew up
less bandwidth require longer time periods to restore service, resulting
in serious delays to the customer.
A group of researchers led by Chunming
Qiao, associate professor of computer science and engineering, has developed
the first approach that achieves both high-bandwidth efficiency and
fast recovery speeds to protect mission-critical connections by introducing
two new tunable parameters.
The researchers' approach to the problem
uses a well-known mathematical formulation of an optimization problem,
called Integer Linear Programming.
"Using one parameter in our model optimizes
bandwidth, which does tend to increase the time it takes to restore
service, but the other parameter in our model more than compensates
by selecting a much shorter backup path," Qiao explained.
The UB team used computer simulations
of the system to demonstrate the concept. Qiao said the next step is
to develop a software package based on the approach.
