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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Fonterra is a global dairy nutrition co-operative owned by 10,000 farmers and their families. As part of its strategy Fonterra puts sustainability at the heart of everything it does. Fonterra is working with MIT and Professor Ian Hunter, to look at new ways it can fundamentally transform its sustainability foot print from grass (on farm robots) to glass ( sustainable packaging). This work includes the goal of reducing and repurposing cow methane from a pollutant to an energy source while simultaneously leveraging other interlinked breakthroughs. Carl MacInnes, the Director Sales & Marketing Disruption will outline some of the ideas and approaches that are being considered.