Adrien Treuille to give Spring 2012 Wing Lectures

(Wing Lecture Poster)

Adrien Treuille will give the Spring 2012 G. Milton Wing Lectures on March 7 and 8, 2012. Dr. Treuille, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008, is one of the country's leading young computer scientists. Currently on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, he holds an NSF CAREER Award, is a panelist for the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and in 2009 was named by MIT Technology Review as one of the Top Innovators Under 35.

The Wing series is funded by a generous bequest from the late applied mathematician and UR alumnus, G. Milton Wing (BA, 1944; MS, 1947; Cornell Ph.D., 1950), intended to support lectures

"... by one or more distinguished scientists ... in the general area of creative application of mathematics to subjects, problems and fields of interest to the larger scientific community."

Dr. Treuille's first talk will be on crowd-sourcing of scientific discovery, and is intended be for a general university audience. The more specialized second lecture will discuss model reduction for efficient simulation of complex systems.

Lecture 1: Interactive Biology

Wednesday, March 7, 5 - 6 pm, Hutchison Hall 140 (Hubbell Auditorium)

Nanoscale engineering holds the key to developing next-generation therapies, but this painstaking process depends on the difficult task of predicting molecular self-assembly. This talk describes two unprecedented "citizen science" projects to rapidly advance bioengineering. Our on-line protein folding game, Foldit, challenges non-experts to fold proteins, a puzzle akin to "3D Tetris." Our brand new nano-engineering game, EteRNA, pushes this concept into the rich and confounding world of real experimentation and validation: every week, we synthesize top EteRNA player designs and return this data as score back into the game. EteRNA thus enabling thousands of enthusiasts to stringently test scientific hypotheses on a weekly basis. Both games now hosts a thriving communities of citizen scientists who are outperforming existing state-of-the-art algorithmic methods.

Lecture 2: New Approaches to Modeling and Control of Complex Dynamics

Thursday, March 8, 3:30 - 4:30 pm, Goergen Hall 101 (Sloan Auditorium)

Complex phenomena such as animal morphology, human motion, and large fluid systems challenge even our most sophisticated simulation and control techniques. My overarching research goal has been to develop fundamentally new methods to approach such high-dimensional and nonlinear problems. This talk presents my work solving these problems across a wide range of phenomena, including a new model-reduction approach to fluids that is orders-of-magnitude faster than standard simulation methods and enables interactive high-resolution fluid simulation for the first time. Another example is a continuum approach to crowd dynamics which efficiently reproduces empirical aspects of large crowd behavior that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with traditional agent models. The talk will also cover work on several other phenomena including human animation, animal morphology, and protein folding. Such new algorithmic approaches advance not only our ability to simulate and control complex systems but also our understanding of the systems themselves.