Recent engineering news from across Columbia.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his economic development team and a host of local elected officials came to the Northwest Corner Building on July 30 to announce their support for Columbia's new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering.
A novel robotic platform for minimally invasive single-port surgery that they say is the world’s smallest in required diameter (∅15 mm) that can enter the body while enabling dual-arm-dexterous operation, 3-D visualization, and automated instrument tracking.
People often say that a book changed their lives—for some it might be "To Kill a Mockingbird," for others it’s Plato's "The Republic." For Dimitris Anastassiou, it was a biology textbook.
Dirk Englund is developing technology that tackles one of the most pressing problems of the Information Age— keeping information secure.
For the first time this fall, entrepreneurial-minded engineering students are living together in Res. Inc., an initiative of the Engineering School in which 72 students—45 of them first-years—share more than kitchen space in their suites on the eighth floor of Hartley and Wallach halls.
Anyone who uses multithreaded computer programs—and that’s all of us, as these are the programs that power nearly all software applications including Office, Windows, MacOS, and Google Chrome Browser, and web services like Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and iCloud—knows well the frustration of computer crashes, bugs, and other aggravating problems.
In September, Popular Science named Eitan Grinspun to its “Brilliant 10” list of top researchers in the U.S. Calling him a “computational contortionist,” the magazine lauded the associate professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering School for helping to create an entirely new field of geometry.
Engineering professor Shih-Fu Chang is trying to make visual search technology as effortless as typing a keyword like “Morningside restaurants” into Google.
Vijay Modi, a professor of mechanical engineering, is working to create sustainable energy models for cities, such as New York, where current infrastructure will not be able to support future demand, and for countries as far away as Tanzania, where power costs are high and energy is inefficient.
“The best liars are the people who tell the truth most of the time,” said Hirschberg, who is teaching Computational Approaches to Emotional Speech at the Engineering School this term.
Steven Bellovin always had a knack for catching computer hackers—even before most people knew what they were.