June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008
Following is a selection of news media stories about Rensselaer people and programs. The stories are listed by date, with the most recent articles first. Note that some publications may require subscriptions or logins to access individual articles online.
06/30/2008
Web 2.0 Start-Ups = Social Science Experiments
ReadWriteWeb
It is personally exciting for me to have Rensselaer take such a leadership position in this emerging science as they are close to where I live in what has historically been the "sleepy government town of Albany". All the tech action was either south to New York City or east to Boston. There have been attempts for some time to create a Tech Valley high tech zone in the area. But this new drive by Rensselaer will make a difference. . . . Rensselaer is clearly staking a position in the elite technology world usually reserved for Stanford and MIT. This will create some new technology. I caught an early glimpse of some of the web technology coming out of the Rensselaer labs and it looked very exciting.
Read the story.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
06/29/2008
Effects of acid rain slowly lessen
Daily Gazette
At one time, Brook Trout Lake in the Adirondacks was full of fish. That was before the lake’s once pristine waters became too acidic for fish to live in, the result of acid rain. But after amendments to the federal Clean Air Act went into effect in 1990, the lake began to recover, and several years ago the state Department of Environmental Conversation reintroduced fish to Brook Trout Lake. Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer, director of the Darrin Fresh Water Institute of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said she believes it’s the first time fish have successfully returned to a lake where all of the fish died because of acid rain. It may be a sign of things to come. Researchers at the Darrin Institute in Bolton Landing have been studying 30 lakes in the southwest corner of Adirondack Park, one of the areas most severely impacted by acid rain, since 1994.
Read the story, which was also covered by United Press International.
Read the Rensselaer news release
06/26/2008
Exploring a world of opportunity
Times Union
Eleven entrepreneurs from the city of Montpellier in the south of France were in town this week, hoping to get some American dollars. All are members of the Montpellier Agglomeration's Business Innovation Centre, business incubator that signed a partnership agreement with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's incubator about a year ago. As part of a three-day tour of the Capital Region, they participated Wednesday morning in the Venture Bplan series, a monthly venture capital forum sponsored by the RPI incubator program and the Center for Economic Growth, an Albany-based regional economic development group. . . . 'They all have great customers,' said Michael Tentnowski, director of RPI's incubator, located on Peoples Avenue. 'They have two years in a university setting. They have pre-incubation, and then they go into the (Montpellier) incubator.'
Read the story.
06/24/2008
Students take part in Raft Rally
Capital News 9
Members of the ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp paid a visit to local middle school students at the RPI campus. The idea is to stress the importance of science and engineering, and today this is all done through a little project they call the Raft Rally.
Assistant Dean of Students Cynthia Smith said, "The raft rally is to get the student teams engaged in solving a problem and constructing a boat that is able to hold weight and they're competing to see how much weight the boat can hold." The goal is to create a raft from two pieces of aluminum foil and four plastic straws, but this is more than just another activity.
Read the story and watch the video clip here.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
06/21/2008
Teaching AI to be Sociable
IEEE Spectrum
In the real world, we've yet to create artificial intelligences that can respond so intuitively to our needs. The quest to do so has pushed two groups of researchers in nearly opposite directions. One group, at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, N.Y., has built Eddie, an AI that resides in the virtual world of Second Life and harnesses the power of a supercomputer to analyze a library of rules about human thinking. . . . "We're not there yet, but a major turning point for AI is working out logic that can do justice to your views of another person's mind," says
Selmer Bringsjord, an AI expert who heads the cognitive science department at RPI. For an artificial intelligence to fully interact and cooperate with people, it has to understand the concept of a mind separate from its own, he explains. Bringsjord and his team created Eddie with this goal in mind, and in March 2008, showed off some of its social skills in
Second Life.
Read the story.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
06/19/2008
Former DEC commissioner joins RPI
Newsday via the Associated Press
Former state Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Erin Crotty is taking a job as director of community relations for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, her alma mater. Allison Newman, assistant vice president of government and community relations at RPI, says Crotty will represent RPI in its dealings with local communities, government and economic development.
Read the story, which was also covered by the Times Union and the Business Review.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
06/17/2008
RPI students share expertise with schools
Times Union
Area high school students won't just be reading about electric cars next year. They'll be exploring cutting-edge research in alternative energy and the mechanics behind the cars of the future as part of a new $2.7 million federal grant. In the fall, nine graduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will work with area science teachers as part of a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation. Students will assist teachers during the school year in developing lessons, interactive games and research projects related to energy and the environment. The future of America depends on young people's interest in science and technology so the country can remain a global leader, said Deborah Kaminski, associate professor of mechanical engineering at RPI.
Read the story.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
06/16/2008
Let There Be Light
Transmission & Distribution World
You might want to check out the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. I contacted Dr. Nadarajah Narendran, director of the solid-state lighting program there. He informed me that, There are some LED technologies now available that can challenge traditional light sources in several lighting applications, providing not only better-quality light but also superior performance. But Narendran warned me that we are in a buyer beware environment and that not all LED lighting fixtures perform as touted. Researchers at the Lighting Research Center determined that traditional measurement methods have not provided realistic performance results for LED lighting fixtures, so they are developing new performance metrics with formal user recommendations.
Read the story.
06/15/2008
How Life Began
The History Channel
Three Rensselaer faculty members will be featured in a new History Channel documentary about the origins of life. Professors James Ferris, Wayne Roberge, and Douglas Whittet were interviewed at length for the episode, which airs beginning June 16.
Click here to view the show’s schedule and to learn more about the episode.
06/13/2008
New Efforts to Detect Explosives Require Advances on Many Fronts
Science Magazine
Another approach to finding explosions is to pick out their molecular signatures from afar. Xi-Cheng Zhang, an electrical engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, thinks that terahertz (THz) beams might be the answer. THz radiation lies between the infrared and microwave parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and can pass through barriers such as clothing and plastic without being a health hazard. In recent years, some airports have begun testing THz imaging systems to look for concealed weapons on airline passengers. Researchers have also found that most explosive molecules absorb THz radiation at frequencies between 0.5 to 1.0 THz, so explosives stand out in reflected THz beams. Zhang and his colleagues, including North-eastern's Silevitch, are hoping to exploit this property to detect explosives from distances of 100 meters or more.
Read the story.
06/13/2008
RPI lands $2.7M federal grant to team graduate students with high school teachers
The Business Review
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has received a $2.7 million National Science Foundation grant designed to get science and engineering graduate students into high school classrooms. The Troy school said the five-year grant will team Rensselaer graduate students with nine teachers at four high schools in Albany, Troy, East Greenbush and the Questar III BOCES High School. The theme of Rensselaer's program is "Energy and the Environment." The Rensselaer students and high school teachers will work together to develop and implement new lessons, class materials and research projects on topics such as alternative energy and global challenges. . . . The purpose of the grant is to encourage students to pursue careers in science, engineering or technology.
Read the story, which was also covered by Capital News 9.
06/12/2008
Web inventor predicts future of online world
San Francisco Chronicle via
Associated Press
The British scientist who invented the World Wide Web said Wednesday that online social systems could change the way science and even democratic government is conducted. Tim Berners-Lee made the comments as a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute symposium launched a new academic center devoted to Web science called the Tetherless World Research Constellation. In a keynote speech, Berners-Lee sketched out a vision of the Web with more computing power, more pages and higher bandwidth that will be displayed on more portable devices with better displays. He said social systems developed on the Web could help people sort out the basic problems of what they believe (science) and what they do (government).
Read the AP story, which was picked up by outlets ranging from Forbes magazine to the Seattle Times. A wide array of media covered the launch event, including PCWorld, PCMagazine, ComputerWorld, the Times Union, and a live blog by ReadWriteWeb.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
06/10/2008
Anticipating the Future to ‘See’ the Present
New York Times
In the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Sussex argue that the brain’s adaptive ability to see into the near future creates many common illusions. “It takes time for the brain to process visual information, so it has to anticipate the future to perceive the present,” said Mark Changizi, the lead author of the paper, who is now at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “One common functional mechanism can explain many of these seemingly unrelated illusions.” . . . Dr. Changizi and his colleagues hold that it is a general principle the brain applies to a wide variety of illusions that trick the brain into sensing motion.
Read the story.
Changizi also appeared live June 3 on the FOX News morning program “America’s Newsroom.” Click here to watch the 4-minute video. (The video will play after a short advertisement.)
Read the Rensselaer news release.
06/10/2008
Nation needs more engineers, scientists
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
After the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in the late 1950s, President John F. Kennedy called the nation to act, to produce the engineers and scientists needed to compete. But that was 50 years ago, and now, those engineers and scientists are retiring in droves. The nation now faces what
Shirley Ann Jackson calls a "quiet crisis" in filling those positions, though more are starting to listen and act. One of them is
Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and also the first African-American and woman to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She spoke Monday at the Women in Engineering Proactive Network conference at the Hyatt Regency in downtown St. Louis. "There's a lot to do, but I'm an optimist," said Jackson. "But by being an engineer or scientist you are an optimist, because you look for solutions."
Read the story.
Read President Jackson’s full speech.
06/08/2008
Rensselaer Graduates Ready To Fill World's Needs
Hartford Courant
The Rensselaer at Hartford graduates who received their master's degrees Saturday joined some pretty impressive company, like the pilot of the Apollo 13 flight, the inventor of e-mail, the director of the first Apollo moon landing and one of the inventors of the television. Saturday's graduates and their distinguished predecessors all have something in common — degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Hartford campus is a branch of the main campus in Troy, N.Y. . . . "You are here receiving your master's degrees because you chose to stretch your limits," said Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson during the ceremony on the campus lawn.
Read the story.
06/01/2008
Lighting in the home
Home Innovations
Patricia Rizzo, leader of Lighting Research Center’s Residential Lighting and DesignWorks programs, did a one-hour live radio interview on the ABC News affiliate out of Washington, D.C., for the show Home Innovations. The hour was devoted to residential lighting and helping consumers understand current lighting technologies, residential applications, and products. Rizzo works to teach homeowners and contractors that you don’t have to sacrifice style for energy efficiency.
Click here to listen to the show.
06/01/2008
Absence makes the team uneasy
Employee Benefit News
The greater prevalence of teleworkers within a department or a division may have a negative effect on job satisfaction among workers who don't telecommute, says Timothy Golden, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. "I wanted to try to better understand the broader implications of telework that go beyond the teleworkers themselves," says Golden, who has been studying flexible work modes and teleworkers for over a decade. He also points out that there's not much research investigating the impact of telework on those who remain in the office.
Read the story.
