Call for Papers: Special Issue on the "Cyber‐Physical Systems for Medical Applications" of IEEE Design & Test

A Special Issue on the "Cyber‐Physical Systems for Medical Applications" of IEEE Design & Test is being planned for publication in September/October 2015. We invite you to submit your papers by October 15, 2014. Information about this Special Issue can be found at:
http://www.eng.ucy.ac.cy/theocharides/ieeedt/CFP_MedCPS2014_DandT.pdf

Prospective authors should follow the submission guidelines for IEEE Design & Test. All manuscripts must be submitted electronically to the IEEE Manuscript Central Web site at http://www.manuscriptcentral.com/. Indicate that you are submitting your article to the special issue on “Cyber‐Physical Systems for Medical Applications”. All papers will undergo the standard IEEE Design & Test review process.

For any question, feel free to contact the Guest Editors:
Paul Bogdan, pbogdan@usc.edu
Rahul Mangharam, rahulm@seas.upenn.edu

TerraSwarm Investigator Carlos Guestrin Talks about GraphLab's New Machine-Learning Software

TerraSwarm investigator and GraphLab co-founder / CEO Carlos Guestrin, was recently interviewed by gigaom.com about the release of their new machine learning commercial software, GraphLab Create.   GraphLab was launched in 2013 to develop an open-source software platform for high-performance, scalable machine learning and graph analytics.  The new software they have developed allows users to run a number of popular machine learning tasks on data stored in graphs or tables.

The article quotes Guestrin:

The goal of Create is to help savvy engineers or data scientists take their machine learning projects from idea to production. It includes a handful of modules for building certain types of popular workloads, including recommendation engines, graph analysis and clustering and regression algorithms.

One of Create’s main benefits is simplicity. Users write, test and deploy their jobs in Python, and the jobs execute in GraphLab’s C++ engine to step up the speed. Jobs can execute on a laptop or across a cluster of servers running Hadoop (with YARN), and built-in management tooling lets users monitor running jobs. 

The way iOS did for mobile applications, Guestrin wants GraphLab Create to make it so anybody with the inclination and a modicum of coding skills can start building machine learning applications without worrying about all the hairy details around optimization, deployment and other historically time-consuming processes. 

Can a software product like GraphLab Create democratize machine learning?  To read more of Guestrin's comments and what capabilities GraphLab plans to include in future versions of their software, go to: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/15/graphlab-wants-to/.

Robotics Fellowship at UPenn Established with UTRC Gift

United Technologies Research Center, the research and innovation arm of United Technologies Corp., has gifted $250,000 to the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science to establish a fellowship in robotics, according to Penn News. It will provide financial support to doctoral candidates and doctoral research students working in Penn Engineering’s GRASP (General Robotics Automation, Sensing and Perception) Laboratory.  

Vijay Kumar, Penn Engineering’s UPS Foundation Professor and TerraSwarm Researcher, was quoted in the article:

“UTRC’s investment will enable strategic collaboration with one of the country’s leading industry research laboratories. The GRASP Laboratory integrates computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering in an environment that fosters interaction between students, research staff and faculty. We are focusing on advanced technologies that enable autonomous operation of aerial and ground vehicles in unstructured environments. The UTRC gift will allow doctoral students to investigate and develop solutions to these problems.” 

In the article, David Parekh, UTRC Vice President, Research, and Director was quoted:

“Research and curriculum development in robotics and intelligent systems is relevant to many of United Technologies’ products. Working with Penn Engineering and other forward-thinking universities helps us further develop expertise and also attract talent in areas where research and technology help evolve industries critical to our nation’s economy.”

UTRC, United Technologies Research Center, provides advanced technologies to businesses of United Technologies (UTC) —an industry leader in high technology products and services for the building and aerospace industries.  UTC is one of the industry partners of the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, which provides funding to the TerraSwarm Research Center.

To read the Penn News article in its entirety, go to: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/utrc-gift-establishes-robotics-fellowship-university-pennsylvania.