Hello Truman CSer's :-) I would like to invite you all to come and hear Dr. Bruce McMillin from UMR speak next week. He'll be here next Tuesday at 7:00 in VH 1212 speaking about his research involving distributed computering and the power grid. It's going to be very interesting and exciting-- and I hope to see you all there!
Also, if any of you are even considering grad school at Rolla, you should especially come, as Dr. McMillin is the man in charge of graduate admissions into the computer science department at Rolla. He's a good person to introduce yourself to :-) Following are the abstract of his talk and his bio: Using Distributed Computering to Control the Power Grid Bruce McMillin Professor - Department of Computer Science University of Missouri-Rolla [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bulk power systems form one of the largest and most complex inter-connected transportation networks ever built. These networks throughout the world consist of large numbers of energy sources operating in near synchronism coupled through a high-voltage AC transmission system. With increasingly heavier power transfers, such systems become vulnerable to cascading failure as dynamics can couple throughout the system in unpredictable ways. Cascading failures may be brought on by naturally occurring events, or may be induced through terrorist-type activities. Examples of naturally occurring cascading failures include the infamous New York blackouts of 1965 and of August 2003, the Septmeber 30, 2003 blackout in Italy, and as well as the two California blackouts of July and August 1996. One of the most promising decentralized network controllers is the family of power electronics-based controllers, known as ``flexible AC transmission system'' (FACTS) devices. While these devices offer increased network power flow controllability, the decentralized nature of their actions may cause deleterious interactions between them. In this talk, we propose to utilize flexible topology FACTS devices in developing distributed control strategies to i) detect and mitigate intentional or unintentional cascading failures, ii) develop operating strategies that can automatically adjust to changing economic and physical environments, and iii) develop interaction policies to mitigate counterproductive actions. We realy heavily on graph-theory algorithms and distributed computing techniques in our solution. Biography: Dr. Bruce McMillin received the BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the MS in Computer Science from Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan, in 1979 and 1985 respectively and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, in 1988 on Reliable Parallel Processing. Dr. McMillin has worked in both academia and industry. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science and research investigator in the Intelligent Systems Center at the University of Missouri at Rolla. During this time period he also spent a year on sabbatical at SUNY Stony Brook. He leads and participates in interdisciplinary teams in formal methods for fault tolerance and security in distributed embedded systems. He has also been the director of an NSF REU site in parallel processing. His research has been supported by NSF, AFOSR, and several Missouri Industries. His research interests include fault tolerance, security parallel algorithms, software engineering, and distributed systems theory. Dr. McMillin has authored over 52 refereed papers in international conferences and journals. He has won the University faculty excellence award five times. He was the reliable systems track chair for IEEE COMPSAC 90, panel chair for IEEE COMPSAC 92 and publicity chair for ICDCS 93. I hope to see you all there! Dana ===== "God is bigger than the boogey-man." --Jr. Asparagus __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
