Recent and Upcoming Events

Democracy is a design problem: How changes in design change the outcome of elections

GBCACM Administrator — Fri, 04 May 2012 03:33:28 +0000

When:

Thursday, June 21, 2012 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-315

Lecturer(s):

Dana Chisnell

This is a story about how a simple change in type size on a commonly used form led to two major wars and a world wide economic crisis. Design matters.

Over the last 8 years, Dana E. Chisnell has trained more than a thousand election officials to test the design of their ballots to avoid costly mistakes and unwarranted attention. She's given highly rated presentations and workshops for a dozen state election departments and conferences, as well as voter advocacy groups and secretaries of state.

Nanoscale construction with DNA

GBCACM Administrator — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 01:42:10 +0000

When:

Thursday, April 19, 2012 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-315

Lecturer(s):

Shawn Douglas, Wyss Institute, Harvard University

The programmability of DNA makes it an attractive material for constructing intricate nanoscale shapes. One method for creating these structures is DNA origami, in which a multiple-kilobase single-stranded 'scaffold' is folded into a custom nanoscale shape by interacting with hundreds of short oligonucleotide 'staple' strands. I will talk about our efforts to realize demand-meeting applications of this method, including our recent development of nanoscale devices to mimic cell-signaling stimulation carried out by our own immune systems.

Shawn Douglas received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Yale in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard in 2009. His research interest is in developing experimental methods and software to construct and manipulate self-assembling biomaterials on the nanometer scale. He worked as a graduate student in the laboratories of William Shih and George Church to generate custom three-dimensional shapes using the "DNA origami" method, including a novel alignment medium for NMR structure determination of membrane proteins.

Life Redesigned: The Emergence of Synthetic Biology

DavidPresberg — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:03:03 +0000

When:

Thursday, March 29, 2012 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Broad Institute - 7 Cambridge Center

Room:

Auditorium

Lecturer(s):

J.J. Collins,

Synthetic biology is bringing together engineers and biologists to design and construct biological circuits out of proteins, genes and other bits of DNA, and to use these circuits to rewire and reprogram organisms. These re-engineered organisms are going to change our lives in the coming years, leading to cheaper drugs, "green" means to fuel our car and clean our environment, and targeted therapies to attack "superbugs" and diseases such as cancer.

J. J. Collins has appointments at each of:

The Journeyman Programmer: Programming - More Than Coding

Peter Carmichael — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 01:01:51 +0000

When:

Saturday, May 19, 2012 - 9:00am

Room:

G115

Venue:

Harvard University (Maxwell Dworkin)

Lecturer(s):

Joseph Bowen, Damon Poole, Dana Chisnell, Russ Doty

4 Interesting topics for Journeymen Software Developers: Desktop Support and Deployment Implications, How to be a Member of an Agile Team, Modeling the User, Opportunity in Open Source.

Seminar in Detail:

More to come

Hands On Workshop: Learn To Use Capacitative Sensing Technology to Interface to Sliders, Buttons and Clickwheels

Peter Mager — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:06:43 +0000

When:

Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 6:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-315

Lecturer(s):

Patrick Kane and Mike Daly, Cypress Semiconductor

This workshop will teach you approaches for providing touch sensing capabilities using Cypress CapSense technology. Workshop attendees will perform hands-on labs utilizing the Cypress PSoC in multiple touch sense and proximity sensing applications. Kits will be available for the labs and a discount code will be supplied for those registered attendees who want to purchase kits before or after the lab. More information on PSoC can be found at www.cypress.com/cua .

IEEE 802.22 Standard: Regional and Rural Area Broadband Wireless Access Using Cognitive Radio Technology in Television Whitespaces

Peter Mager — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:25:40 +0000

When:

Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Verizon Laboratories, Inc.

Lecturer(s):

Apurva N. Mody, Chair, IEEE 802.22 Standard Working Group

This talk will be about the IEEE 802.22 Standard on Wireless Regional
Area Networks (WRANs) which was published in July 2011. IEEE 802.22
systems will provide broadband access to wide regional areas around
the world and bring reliable and secure high-speed communications to
under-served and un-served rural communities, which are estimated to
include nearly half of the worlds population. The IEEE 802.22-2011 is
the first IEEE 802 Standard for operation in the Television (TV)
Whitespaces, defined as the available or un-occupied TV channels. It

Dr. Apurva N. Mody (apurva.mody@ieee.org) is the Chair of IEEE 802.22
Working Group (WG) for Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRANs) (www.ieee802.org/22)
. He is the driving force behind the WhiteSpace Regional Area Networks
Alliance (www.wranalliance.org). The primary aim of the IEEE 802.22 WG
is to create commercial wireless standards that will use TV

IEEE 802.22 Standard: Regional and Rural Area Broadband Wireless Access Using Cognitive Radio Technology in Television Whitespaces

Peter Mager — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:24:53 +0000

When:

Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Verizon Laboratories, Inc.

Lecturer(s):

Apurva N. Mody, Chair, IEEE 802.22 Standard Working Group

The Secret Lives of Links

Peter Mager — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:21:14 +0000

When:

Thursday, January 19, 2012 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Constant Contact/Reservoir Place

Room:

Constant Contact

Lecturer(s):

Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site.

Yet, what do we really know about them? If you create great links, your users easily find everything they need on your site. If you do a poor job, your users will find your site impossible or frustrating. We never discuss what truly makes a good link good. Until now. Jared will show you the latest thinking behind the art and science of making great links. Join him for this entertaining and amusing look at the secret lives of our site's links.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Genome Engineering and the Construction of New Genetic Codes

Peter Mager — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:35:59 +0000

When:

Thursday, November 17, 2011 - 7:00pm

Venue:

Broad Institute - 7 Cambridge Center

Room:

auditorium

Lecturer(s):

Peter Carr

Our capacity to engineer genetic material is moving beyond the level of single genes to the scale of genomes. Still, our ability to paint effectively on a canvas as large as a genome is minute, dwarfed by our growing ability to synthesize DNA, which is in turn dwarfed by our ability to sequence. Current attempts to engineer at this scale are first and foremost an exploration of to what extent living systems can be re-designed and modified.

Synthetic biology: from parts to modules to therapeutic systems

Peter Mager — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:08:11 +0000

IEEE Computer and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Societies, MIT biological engineering and biomedical engineering student group (BE-BMES), and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, October 27, 2011

MIT room 66-110

Synthetic biology: from parts to modules to therapeutic systems

Ron Weiss