In an increasingly carbon-constrained world, lignocellulosic biomass, natural gas, and carbon dioxide have emerged as attractive options to supply energy, fuels, and chemicals at scale in a cleaner and more sustainable manner. However, the unique chemical makeup of these alternative carbon sources has created daunting conversion challenges, requiring the development a new generation of robust, active, and selective catalysts. In this lecture, I will show how advanced synthesis techniques can be coupled with rigorous reactivity and characterization studies to uncover unique synergies in nanostructured catalysts.
First, the cooperativity between catalytic pairs in metalloenzyme-like microporous materials will be demonstrated. Specific examples will include the synthesis of diacids from coupling bio-derived keto acids, and the conversion of methane into acetic acid via tandem oxidation and carbonylation reactions.
Second, new developments in the use of heterometallic early transition metal carbide (TMC) nanoparticles will be described as a novel platform to replace (or drastically reduce) noble metal utilization in electro- and thermo-catalytic applications. A new method to synthesize TMCs and core-shell TMC-noble metal structures with exquisite control over composition, size, crystal phase, and purity will be demonstrated. Structure-activity descriptors can then be elucidated and used to guide the design of new catalytic materials.
We live in the era where almost everything we do is recorded somewhere. Naturally such massive amounts of social data contains wealth of information about us. This presents us with a huge opportunity to utilize it for operating businesses efficiently, making meaningful policies and better social living. In this talk, I will discuss how we can utilize social data for predicting preferences of a business's customers accurately. We will discuss such a desirable, scalable data processing system for predicting customer preferences that we have built and deployed. We will describe success stories of this technology in the retail industry.
For centuries we enjoyed light and sound as tools to manipulate, store and control the flow of information and energy. However, our need to transmit information and energy through these wave channels suffered a physical limit dictated by diffraction. For example, Young’s double slit experiments suggest that for an observer at a distance away from the two slits, one cannot distinguish these slits from one when the gap of these slits are close to wavelength of light. Can we overcome the diffraction limit by bending and folding waves, in a similar fashion to paper origami?
In this seminar, I will present our efforts to fabricate 3D complex microstructures at unprecedented dimensions. In the arena of sound waves, these structures show promise on focusing and rerouting ultrasound through broadband and highly transparent metamaterials. Recently our research effort on acoustic metamaterials has been expanded to tailoring the wavefront and energy flow of elastic waves. In the optical domain, we report our development of optical imaging probes to measure the distinct local modes in the nanostructures that promote electron-photon interaction down to layers of a few atoms thick, which promise for efficient light emission and detection. These novel metamaterials could be the foundation of broadband photo-absorbers, directional emitters, as well as compact and power-efficient devices.
An important evolution in the provision and consumption of electricity services is underway. Technological advances in information and communication technologies, demand response, distributed generation, energy storage, and advanced power electronics and control devices are creating new options for the provision of electricity services. A framework for proactive regulatory reform is needed to enable the efficient evolution of the power system, including improvements to the pricing of electricity services, incentives for distribution utilities, power sector structure, and electricity market design. With this framework in place, myriad consumers and producers of electricity services can make efficient choices based on accurate incentives reflecting the economic value of these services and their own diverse personal preferences.
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Principal Investigators Mathias Kolle , Sanjay Sarma
The quality factor, representing the ratio between the number of round trips that a photon takes in the cavity and the cavity losses, determines the maximum attainable light amplification