fall 2012 cable magazine

Fall 2012 Vol. 39 | No. 10

WHERE ENGINEERING MEETS ART

Fall 2012

Contents

L AUNCHPAD

President's Letter ...............................................................4Letter from Distinguished Alum .............................................5

ON THE C OVER

The fields of art and engineering have long intersected in innovative and exciting ways. Our fall issue, themed Where Engineering Meets Art, explores those unique, creative endeavors in the digital age.

10|LUKE DUBOIS

Luke DuBois discusses “vertical music” and the intersection of digital media and the arts, from music to the use of language and the diversity of human thought.

06| THE ENABLED PUBLIC

Anyone can find great works of art online and print it out, but does that make for enlightened discourse? Chistopher Leslie looks at social media and its affect on the arts.

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FEATURES

TABLE OF C ONTENT S

Contents

DEPARTMENT S

Faculty News and Research .......................................... 28Faculty Notes ............................................................ 31Poly Buzz .................................................................. 32Alumni News ............................................................ 37Events ...................................................................... 44In Memoriam, Obituary ............................................... 44Class Notes ............................................................... 45

14|MARC GALLO

Using digital signal processing, Marc Gallo creates the sound of electric guitar amplifiers, like Marshall or Fender, without spending thousands of dollars on hardware.

18| WHEN LEFT MEETS RIGHT

NYU-Poly students like Daphany Sanchez (shown) find the balance and rewards of pursuing twin passions in both engineering and the arts, be it dancing or painting.

24| KAHO ABE

Game Lab artist-in-residence has come up with new ways of thinking outside the vid-eo-game box. First step: Elimi-nate a handheld controller and replace with the human body.

| ON THEWEB

Access the fall 2012 digital edition of Cable at cable.poly.edu/fall2012!

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PRESIDENT'S LET TERMASTHEAD

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Jerry MacArthur HultinPRESIDENT

Erica MarksVICE PRESIDENT DEVELOPMENT AND

ALUMNI RELATIONS, INTERIM

Valerie CabralDIRECTOR OF ALUMNI RELATIONS

Melynda FullerDIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

EDITOR, CABLE

Alexander GelfandKarl Greenberg

Harvest HendersonHallie KapnerPatrick KeeffeCielo Lutino Liza Monroy Elinor Nauen

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Accelerant Studios PUBLICATION DESIGN

Marian GoldmanElena Olivo

PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Address Correspondence to:Melynda Fuller, Cable Editor

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Earlier this fall, we celebrated a first at NYU-Poly: an art opening on our Brooklyn campus. Two of our alumni, Kent and Marguerite Charugundla, ’12MOT and ’10MOT, respectively, shared their collection—a wonderful mix of paintings and

Bollywood posters which now lines the hallways of our administrative offices and Rogers Hall—with us. Students are already catching me and saying, “Wow, that is cool!” and corporate people walk onto campus and say, “This place has an edge.”

The intersection of design and engineering is game-changing. Steve Jobs showed the world that. The exhibit creates an environment where our students interact with art, where they can learn to think in new and different ways because of it.

In this issue of Cable, themed Where Engineering Meets Art, you’ll meet three NYU-Po-ly students who have already found that intersection in “When Left Meets Right: Poly Students Who Do It All”; find a profile of our artist-in-residence Kaho Abe in the Game Innovation Lab who is using her background as a fashion designer to take game design to a new level; and hear from Poly alum Marc Gallo, an electrical engineer revolutionizing the way music is made. All of these are great examples of the innovation that happens when engineering and art collide.

As we become a school of NYU in the next two years, great opportunities will continue to emerge for our students. Our budding engineers will have access to all of the wonder-ful creative collaborations happening across NYU, including film studies, the liberal arts, policy, law and business. Most of all, Poly’s i2e spirit has helped our alumni, faculty, staff and current students find new ways to create a better world.

With Warmest Regards,

Jerry M. Hultin

LET TER FROM DISTINGUISHED ALUM: JOHN SCHAEFER

I’ve been fascinated with photography as an art form and a form of commu-nication my entire life. When I was

a young child, the son of immigrants, I came to know my relatives through photo-graphs—the only way I could know those who were out of reach; as I grew older, I realized that photographs are incredibly important documents, more powerful than written documents in many cases.

Photographs taken in the 1860s during the Civil War and in the 1850s during the Crimean War allowed people to see the impact of battle for the first time. This was only possible because of the invention of the camera, and marks a revolutionary occasion when art and technology inter-sected to permanently change the public’s access to a form of creative expression, by effect opening up the world. The Vietnam War came to an end because of photog-raphy, when the public couldn’t stand to see another horrific image from abroad, and, before that, photographers like Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis raised social aware-ness about issues like child labor and immigrants’ rights. Portraits, formerly

the domain of painters and the wealthy, became accessible to the common man through photography.

For me, the intersection between science and art begins at a molecular level. Early on, I began to print my own photographs in a dark room I built for myself. Being a chemist, I used my knowledge to explore exotic processes during the developing and printing process. Artists often ignore the expected rules of their medium and create works of art in the process, while scientists are committed to bringing order to things. I try to make nature as neatly defined a process as possible in my imag-es—the scientist in me, while manipulat-ing the medium after in the darkroom—the artist.

Past history has shown that technology also allows the creation of art to become a more democratic process, giving indi-viduals the ability to share thoughts and ideas more easily. Ultimately, technology gives artists the enhanced ability to com-municate about the subjects that moved them to create in the first place.

A Scientist's Touch, an Artist's EyeJohn Schaefer, NYU-Poly alum and board member and President Emeritus of the University of Arizona, has had a lifelong passion for photography. In addition to producing his own body of nature photography, he co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 1975 with Ansel Adams and has published three best selling books on photographic technics. To open our Fall 2012 issue of Cable focusing on the intersection of engineering and the arts, Schaefer shared his thoughts on the blending of science and creativity.


Mission San Xavier del Bac, located in Tucson and built in the 1700s by Father Kino, a Spanish missionary

A still of the cactus flower Peniocereus greggii

In 1900, Nicolai Tesla had a vision of a service that would beam information to the public, showering them with words as well as free electric power. In

his autobiography, Tesla describes the “world system” whereby watch-sized receivers would allow users to listen to music and hear lectures. Tesla was not the only one with such a dream: Jules Verne described a similar (but wired) system in his novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, and Paul Valéry in 1928 wrote Le conquete de l’ubiquite, where he described a service that would bring music into the home like water, electricity, and gas.

A century later, we seem to be about to realize this vision; although information services are not free, they are approaching the ubiquity of public utilities bringing the arts into the home as reliably as natural

THE ENABLED PUBLIC:SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE ARTS

gas. It is important to remember, though, that even in Tesla’s time there were individuals who worried about turning the arts into a utility. In a1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” E. M. Forester imagines an atomized world in which people have access to artistic productions in their underground homes. The story opens, in fact, with one of the characters preparing to give a lecture on music. The end of the story demonstrates a favorite theme of the early twentieth century: the mechanized world has so isolated people that the society no longer sustains a healthy infrastructure.

I am often drawn to these competing visions when I am teaching courses in the history of media at NYU-Poly. Forester’s nightmare makes me wonder if simply providing access to art truly makes a society free. One way to think of the power of art to support a society

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Forester’s nightmare makes me wonder if simply providing access to art truly makes a society free.


is through the theory of the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas has something to say about the place of art in his study The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. In his discussion of how Western society developed the social organizations to support a free society, Habermas notes that art journals were one of the first places in which people learned to have opinions in relation to other public people.

But what about Forester’s story? Here, citizens have access to art, and they comment about it to each other, and yet the society is weak. Public sphere theory can help us to understand this difficulty. The stereotypical location of the public that Habermas identifies is the coffee house. The coffee (and cocoa) houses that popped up across Europe in the seventeenth century showed how individuals were willing to invest a little money for a cup of coffee and a chance to have a free-floating discussion where the primary criterion for excellence was not the rank of the speaker but the persuasiveness of what he or she was saying.

If we think of art museums as institutions that support the public sphere, we realize that they are not a trivial part of this process. Although we think of them as the place that holds art, they also have a more basic function in the process of a free society: they are a place where people can go to talk about art, and to learn more about art. Public institutions start a conversation about art that is not tied to the opinions of the owner of a home (the private sphere), and is not bound directly to the opinions of the state (the state sphere). They also help us to encounter expert opinions in the same way that Habermas thought that art criticism helped inform readers about art and, at the same time, be inspired to make their own critiques in the context of a public conversation.

In the media transformation before us today, we must consider how institutions that support the public sphere should adapt. Online retailers threaten to displace physical stores, giving them the retronym “brick-and-mortar” stores. If the same transformation

should happen to the art museum, what would happen? Certainly one could imagine the heavy bricks of museums being replaced by the cloud, and there is no need to maintain the mortar of libraries if we can read literature at home. Making screen savers from favorite works of art helps us to express individuality, but using a 3D printer to make artistic tchotchkes for the living room will not engender an enlightened public sphere. In a consumer culture of personalized art, everyone keeps to himself or herself. We will end up in the world of atomized opinions that Forester predicted in his dystopia.

As a research project in a new field called the digital humanities, I have thought about how new media could help the arts support the public sphere. One can certainly imagine how new media can initiate a conversation about art. Not just with ourselves, but in a rich dialogue among scholars, students, fans, and casual observers. This summer, as part of NYU-Poly’s Undergraduate Summer Research Program, William Xia ’14ME and I have put the finishing touches on a proposal for a service inspired by social media that will inspire a conversation about literature. We imagine that users will use the platform to express their opinions, and learn from other users, but at the same time have a chance to interact with the opinions of experts and ideas from the past.

In projects such as these, it may be possible to combine the best features of new media—such as ease of access, portability, and inexpensive archives – with the important mechanisms of the humanities that support the public sphere. If the arts are to remain the bulwark of a free society, then we must have a conversation about how they will do so in our increasingly mediated world. Lest we inadvertently bring about E. M. Forester’s nightmare, we must enable the enlightened society imagined by Tesla, Verne, and Valéry. Art does not make us look at it, and art does not transform society on its own. Societies prior to ours have made a place for art; the challenge that faces us is how we might do the same.

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If the arts are to remain the bulwark of a free society, then we must have a co

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R. LUKEDUBOIS:

COLLABORATINGAT THE

INTERSECTION OFART AND SCIENCE

What do you get when you cross a composer with a computer whiz? At NYU-Poly, the answer might be R. Luke DuBois, an artist and performer who has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance.

DuBois, NYU-Poly’s acting director of Integrated Digital Media Program in the Department of Technology, Culture and

Society, is also the co-author of the Jitter software and appears on some 25 albums, both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group the Freight Elevator Quartet.


DuBois, who is starting his fifth year at Poly, is currently writing “vertical music” in which he videotapes brief compositions then plays them back extra-slow, so that a four-minute piece takes 40 minutes to listen to. “You can hear what they are actually doing, microtonally,” he explains. “All these things you can’t see or hear when you watch musicians—such as vibrato—become super-apparent.”

DuBois might be best known for a piece called “Hindsight Is 20/20,” which is based on a statistical analysis of the State of the Union addresses of the first 43 presidents. Using an algorithm developed by The New York Times, DuBois found 66 unique words for each president and laid them out like an eye chart. A sample of top words hints at two centuries of American concerns: gentlemen, France, Oregon, empire, slavery, coinage, Soviet. “Terror” was the word George W. Bush used most, “idea” was his father’s, and for Clinton it was “21st,” as in century. Two versions—letterpress and sculpture—debuted at the Republican and Democratic conventions in 2008 and have been touring the country ever since, including at the Smithsonian in spring 2012.

DuBois’s sequel to “Hindsight” used the same algorithm to look at millions of online dating profiles and discover the language of romance around the country. “It’s a critique of the census,” he says. “We use the census to determine the budget, but it’s not really us or who we are. Americans don’t give themselves credit for their language and diversity of thought.” DuBois finds it inspiring to be at NYU-Poly, with its i2e emphasis. “Poly is an amazing community, with the idea that ‘here’s this thing and here’s how it’s going to help or change the world,’” he says. “I’ve learned a lot being here, such as not being afraid to say that the research behind a project is just as important and worth talking about as the final piece.” Perhaps this attitude stems from childhood: DuBois got his first computer (he had asked for a bike) at age 9 and wrote programs to simulate art: the Jackson Pollock program, the Mondrian program, Frank Stella,

Rothko. He learned to “reduce modern art to the underlying process.”

DuBois finds himself intrigued by the many students at Poly “who start out thinking they’ll study computer science or mechanical engineering, then realize that digital media is broad enough to contain elements of many fields.” Computer science, for example, uses programs to make art, and physical computing and circuit design investigate how humans interact with computers. “All of them have applied science embedded in them, to which you add creativity,” he says. “You can teach anyone to be an artist through computer science—and vice versa.”

He hopes his students take away a devotion to collaboration. “As a creative person you’re constantly working with other creative people,” he notes. “We encourage our students to work in teams—it’s the best way to have success. At art school, it would be unusual to work in a collective, but a successful design firm is a successful team. You don’t see too many collectives in

art, but industry is all about collaboration. So we try to teach students to think broadly—not to just do sound, but to think about 3D graphics, web design and so on. They don’t come out an expert in each of these areas, but they do know how it works and the right questions to ask.” Digital media’s research wing also creates opportunities for students to work on real-world projects off-campus.

“This is the century of data,” DuBois concludes. “Whether you like it or not, that’s the metaphor of our life: email, smart phones, TV, bombarded with numbers. What do we do with that?”

Americans don’t give themselves credit for their language and diversity of thought.

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…we try to teach students to think broadly—not to just do sound, but to think about 3D graphics, web design and so on. They don’t come out an expert in each of these areas, but they do know how it works and the right questions to ask.


A SonicEvolution for theDigital Age

Studio Devil Amp Modeler Pro is a guitar amp modeling and audio effects plug-in for use with VST, AudioUnits, and ProTools RTAS compati-ble hosts running on both Mac and Windows platforms


I f Marc Gallo ‘10EE had a theme song, it would probably be “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” After all, during his time at NYU-Poly, Gallo

pretty much proved that title to be more than just a catchy lyric; in the realm of digital signal processing, it also happens to be true.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, Gallo grew up coding video games and playing electric guitar; and it wasn’t long before he decided to combine his interest in music and computer technology.

By the time he arrived at Poly in 2007, Gallo had already patented two novel methods for digitally modeling the sound of the vacuum-tube amplifiers that many professional guitarists swear by. He had also founded a company, Studio Devil, to market and sell a variety of commercial software plug-ins based on his unique tube-modeling algorithms – plug-ins that will let anyone with a guitar and a computer or a mobile device mimic the sound of a classic Marshall or Fend-er amp without having to spend thousands of dollars on hardware. (Gallo has also licensed his technology to major music-software producers like Sony and Cakewalk, a subsidiary of the instrument manufactur-er Roland.)

But Gallo still had work to do.

Having successfully modeled one half of a tube amp system – i.e., the electronic circuits that boost the ini-tial signal from the guitar and produce the distortion that does so much to create a signature tone – he still had to emulate the other half: the loudspeaker cabinet that makes the amplified signal audible, and whose own frequency-filtering effects further massage it, lending their own unique stamp to the ultimate sound.

“A very good portion of the amp sound really comes from that cabinet,” Gallo says.

Audio signal engineers typically use a technique known as convolution processing to simulate the filtering characteristics of loudspeaker cabinets. But as Gallo points out, convolution processing eats an enormous amount of processing power – not a good thing if you’re trying to develop software that will run

on a laptop or an iPhone.

Moreover, the most efficient methods of implement-ing convolution processing have historically come at a price: The less CPU intensive they are, the more laten-cy, or time delay, they generate. That latency intro-duces a pause between the moment the guitar signal enters the system, and the moment it comes back out.

“Imagine hitting a note on an instrument and having to wait a little bit until that note is actually heard,” Gallo says. “If you’re playing live and are trying to get an immediate sound, a latency greater than 10 milli-seconds or 20 milliseconds is really noticeable. If it’s even longer – one second, or two seconds – it makes playing impossible.”

Much of Gallo’s time at Poly was spent trying to discover new methods of convolution processing that would consume less processing power without creat-ing latency. The goal was to put realistic and affordable cabinet emulations within reach.

Modeling a complex apparatus like a loudspeaker cabinet is not easy, however. Everything from the cabinet model to the choice and placement of the microphone used to collect sound samples can radi-cally affect results. So in addition to working out some fancy mathematical techniques for emulating nonlin-ear systems, Gallo also had to take careful measure-ments from a variety of real-world setups, collecting data from iconic cabinets like the Marshall 1960A and the Fender Twin in order to translate their distinctive analog characteristics into the digital realm.

It was worth it.

Gallo’s research, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Ivan Selesnick, formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation. It also led to new and improved Studio Devil software that allows musicians to mix and match an array of virtual amplifiers and cabinets, experi-menting with sound combinations that would require vast amounts of expensive hardware if created the old-fashioned way. His plug-ins even make it possible to combine virtual components that wouldn’t be elec-tronically compatible in the real world, and to push

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[Gallo created] plug-ins that will let anyone with a guitar and a computer or a mobile device mimic the sound of a classic Marshall or Fender amp without having to spend thousands of dollars on hardware.


those components past the point where real vacuum tubes would break down and burn up.

Best of all, the novel convolution processing algo-rithms they employ don’t hog CPU resources, and introduce zero latency.

“Sometimes,” Gallo says, “there is a free lunch.”

What happens when the imagina-tion takes root and grows in different directions within the same person? Three NYU-Poly students—Wanda Molineros ’13BMS, Yangzi (Isabel) Tian ’13CBE, and Daphany Sanchez ’12SUE—are finding the balance and rewards of pursuing twin passions in both engineering and the arts.

When LeftMeets Right:Poly Students Who do it All

FEATURE


Wanda Molineros studies the brains of animals, and taught herself to paint in her spare time. Now, she creates render-ings of scientific research, and uses her artist’s visualization to better understand organisms’ metabolic states


The intersection of science and the arts is nothing new. Albert Einstein played the violin; composer Iannis Xenakis was also an architect-engineer who pioneered the use

of mathematical models in music. And Leonardo Da Vinci… well, da Vinci did everything. In recent years, research has shown that studying the arts can signifi-cantly enhance cognitive ability in other areas.

“Many people don’t recognize the level of inventive-ness necessary to imagine and design an experiment, test an interesting hypothesis, or to choreograph the steps involved in successfully completing an intricate experiment,” says Richard Wener of the Department of Technology, Culture and Psychology, who specializ-es in Environmental Psychology.

Melinda Parham, Director of Freshman Programs, agrees. “The arts and engineering and science are complementary in nature, as they are both concerned with the human condition, and the identification and creation of possible solutions to the problems born out of the process of living,” she says.

The Brightest Thing

In the chilly Biomolecular Science lab, Wanda Molin-eros examines specimens: tarantula, pigeon, and sheep brains. “Right now I’m doing pre-labs, going over and over each system,” she says. Molineros navigates the lab confidently in a crisp striped shirt and jeans; then, she unceremoniously pulls out a rectangle of poster board. “I’ve also been working on this.”

In the drawing, a girl in a crown emerges from graph-ite. Red-painted flowers dot the path at her feet. Molineros began sketching while working as a student assistant in the HEOP (Higher Education Opportuni-ty Program) office during down time three years ago. Now she finds that no matter how busy she gets, she always comes back to her art. “It’s a stress-reliever,” she says. “I like using colored pencil, watercolor and I’m experimenting with oil.”

Born in Columbia, Molineros came to New York with her family at age six, eventually settling in Queens. In high school she focused on math, but freshman

coursework at NYU-Poly inspired her to major in Biomolecular Science. “I was trying hard to go against my mother’s wishes [that I become] a doctor,” she says with a wide smile. “But I really liked biology.”

A self-taught artist, she says, “I do most of my art when I feel like saying something but can’t.” Like a still life of a lamp created during her mother’s cancer treat-ment, when things seemed dark: “I took the brightest thing in my room and drew it.”

Molineros can be somewhat reserved about her artis-tic side, but those who have worked with her praise her talent and drive. “This summer, Wanda thought of a great project of developing a digital anatomy and physiology learning apparatus,” says HEOP Director Shawneece Bailey. The new tool will allow students to move through an artist rendering of the human body, and Molineros is already creating illustrations of mus-cle groups for it using a digital drawing tablet

In her own work on visual renderings of scientific research, Molineros qualifies her perspectives as both artist and scientist as “two different lenses” through which she sees the world with some crossover. “If I can connect the subject artistically in my mind, it enables me to remember it, [and] being a scientist enhances the way I express myself through art, because I can visualize how organisms work through their metabolic states,” she says.

She smiles at the prospect of braiding science with art: “It’s pretty cool to be able to do both.”

A Language That Everyone Understands

Growing up in China, Yangzi (Isabel) Tian performed in children’s TV shows, studied opera, and hosted a school radio program. Then, when she was 13, her family moved to California, and the language barrier put her creative pursuits on hiatus.

One day at her new school, when a friend was teased and Tian didn’t have words to defend her, she decid-ed to master English. “I joined the drama club,” she says. “I learned Shakespeare. I watched The Sound of Music at least 50 times.” She also finished a three-year

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English Language Development program in one year. One day while she was watching the Discovery Chan-nel, she learned the term ‘engineering.’

A few years later, when a massive earthquake struck the Sichuan province of Tian’s native China, and the media reported on children who lost limbs in collapsed schools, a teacher mentioned the medical revolutions that might be achieved through stem cell research. “I couldn’t believe this way of generating all different parts of the body,” says Tian, a jade bracelet sliding on her wrist as she gestures excitedly. “The potential is amazing.”

Like Molineros, Tian watched her mother undergo painful cancer treatments. Now a Chemical and Bio-logical Engineering major, she wants to advance stem cell use in cancer therapies. Her “AntiCancer” project placed third in NYU-Poly’s Inno/Vention Competi-tion; this past summer, she worked at City of Hope University in California under Dr. Karen Aboody, who studies neural stem cell use in treating brain tumors.

Although a glance at her online calendar shows a fully booked schedule, Tian has returned to acting and singing through her presidency of NYU-Poly’s per-forming arts club. Also an avid artist, she draws both portraits and scientific illustrations, which she fre-quently includes in presentations of her work, like the blood vessel she drew during research at Auburn Uni-versity in Alabama last year. “Isabel is an incredible artist and an excellent researcher,” says Dr. Elizabeth Lipke, who supervised Tian there. “By combining her passions, [she] has the unique ability to communicate research in a language that everyone understands.”

Tian credits her engineering pursuits with giving her artistic talents new intention. “Before, I was drawing for aesthetic reasons,” she says. “Now, I see a need for artistic representation in my field. I think we need more interaction between art and science—it’s these kind of combinations that can help to generate the most innovative ideas.”

Her Own Rhythm

Born and raised in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Daphany

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Sanchez credits her Columbian and Puerto Rican par-ents with fueling her love of dance. “Everyone expects my family to be very serious, because my mom is a political activist and my dad is a federal officer,” Sanchez says. “But my dad also DJs. Spanish dancing like Salsa or Bachata or Merengue is something you grow up with.”

When Sanchez transferred to NYU-Poly as a sopho-more to study Sustainable Urban Environments, she co-founded a dance club, Global Fusion.

“This is an engineering school,” she says, “But we en-courage students of all backgrounds to come, even if you have two left feet.” Sanchez herself has both feet in the right places. In a video of the dance club’s campus flash mob last Halloween, she stomps and shimmies to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” with innate grace and obvious pleasure. Global Fusion is another home for Sanchez. The group meets each week to unwind and

learn new techniques, from classical Chinese to Indian Bhangra. “Students step in here, take off their shoes and stretch,” she says. “It’s a little safe haven.”

For Sanchez, engineering and dancing represent dif-ferent ways to flex her creativity. “When I’m dancing, I’m listening to the music [and] I add my own style based on the rhythm that I hear,” she says. “It’s the same with my major—you have to listen and be cre-ative and think outside the box to come up with green initiatives and designs.” On some fundamental level, she says, art and engineering are one and the same: “There’s a science in everything.”

Wener, who instructed Sanchez says, “It is easy to imagine Daphany with a career where she takes on se-rious challenges, but impossible to imagine her taking them on in an ordinary or mundane way and without a bit of a twinkle in her eye.”

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Not Going To Stop

All three students are excited about the future. Mo-lineros is looking into grad schools and careers in the medical field, while Tian plans to earn a Ph.D. in Tissue Engineering with a focus on stem cell research. Sanchez will graduate in December and go straight into her Masters studies in Urban Infrastructure Management and Engineering. “I’d like to work as a medical assistant or continue research in biomolecu-lar science,” she says. “I’m interested in microbiology, and PCR, a form of replicating DNA.” She admits to a

deep curiosity about performing surgery—“I’m really good at cat dissections; I’ve got steady hands,” she says, laughing—and she would also like to try her hand at mural painting.

Will they make time to keep growing as artists as they advance in science and engineering careers? Molineros seems to speak for all three when she smiles and says: “I don’t think it’s something that’s going to stop.”


The arts and engineering and science are complementary in nature, as they are both concerned with the human condition, and the identification and creation of possible solutions to the problems born out of the process of living. –Wanda Molineros

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In case you think NYU-Poly begins and ends with STEM education, think again. The university actually has an artist-in-residence, in the Game Innovation Lab: Kaho Abe, who researches and builds games

that bring people together face-to-face. She describes herself as a designer interested in improving social and personal experiences through the use of technology, fashion and games.

Abe also teaches classes and workshops on designing and building physical games. “I just taught a graduate class at Poly in the Game Lab called Beyond the Joystick, which was cross-listed for students in both the Digital Media and Computer Science departments,” she notes. “I hope the students left the class being able to think better about how technology can exist in physical spaces and how games can be designed around a more human-centric experience rather than a technology-centered one—not exactly the most mainstream thing when iOS and console games are so popular.”

She says Game Lab director Katherine Isbister was interested in bringing someone to help people think in different ways about the technology

Poly’s Artist-

in-Residence

Gaming in Style

Kaho Abe wants to make video games more interactive with a touch of style. The fashion-designer-turned-gamer is throwing out the joystick and pulling in the player with her research at Poly’s CITE Gab Lab.


the lab researches. “Similarities between her work and mine made it seem like a good fit,” Abe says. “The lab does a lot of physical games and so do I.” The two of them are currently collaborating on a game that combines costumes and game controllers, with financial assistance from a Rockefeller grant for wearable technology to the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. “Imagine how being dressed up affects the game experience,” Abe says. “Players may imagine the game better, plus technology can be embedded in the costumes to enhance the quality of the experience.” Her background in fashion—she has an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons the New School for Design and worked as a fashion designer for some 13 years—made it a “natural to combine physical games with costumes.”

One of her deepest interests is the intersection between technology and people. “I understand that people almost have a blind or irrational love for technology. That feeling I don’t disregard—it’s important to identify that we have this irrational love. But how do we bring it more into our world than this limited way?” she muses. “The thing I like about physical games is that they work face-to-face—instead of staring at a screen and being stuck in a limited world, we use technology to play with other people. I want to encourage people to think about how to build technology around human-to-human relations rather than human-to-screen relationships.” Earlier this summer Abe took part in the 2012 World Science Festival, a five-day celebration geared toward engaging the public about science and technology’s wonder, value and implications for the future. Her offering was Ninja Shadow Warrior, a photo-booth arcade game in which players’ moved so that their shadows completed silhouettes of various objects. She encouraged people to play in groups. “If they play with other people, they get better scores,” she explains. “It was really great! Being part of the festival meant a lot of people played my game. There were so many people that day it was crazy!” Another recent project is a physically-active game called Hit Me!, in which players compete in hitting buttons on others’ hats to test their speed and agility. “I’m trying to show that it can be as stimulating as a game on your console,” she says.

FEATURE

NYU-Poly’s Kaho Abe goes beyond the joystick with games like Ninja Shadow Warrior, creating video games where the player is the controller


The thing I like about physical games is that

they work face-to-face—instead of staring

at a screen and being stuck in a limited world,

we use technology to play with other people.


“It’s so exciting what’s happening right now. People understand games are not just frivolous—they require a lot of research, discussion and analysis,” Abe says. “I’m thankful to be here at NYU-Poly. It’s an exciting lab to be part of and great to be included in the discussions and activities.”

FACULT Y NEWS AND RESEARCH

Professor Steve Arnold’s research team at NYU-Poly has created an ultra-sensitive biosensor capable of

identifying the smallest single virus particle one at a time in solution, an advance that may revolutionize early disease detection and shrink test result wait times from weeks to minutes.

Arnold, university professor of applied physics and member of the Othmer-Jacobs Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and researchers of NYU-Poly’s MicroParticle PhotoPhysics Laboratory for BioPhotonics (MP3L) reported their findings in Applied

Physics Letters. The research was originally supported by provost seed funds from the NYU School of Arts and Sciences.

They have created a biosensor sensitive enough to detect and measure a single virus particle in a doctor’s office or field clinic, without the need for special assay preparations or conditions. Normally, this would require the virus to be measured in the vacuum environment of an electron microscope, which adds time, complexity and considerable cost.

Instead, the researchers were able to detect the smallest RNA virus particle, MS2 with

a mass of only 6 attograms. Within the Whispering Gallery-Mode Biosensor, light from a tunable laser is guided down a fiber optic cable, where its intensity is measured by a detector on the far end. A small glass sphere is brought into contact with the fi-ber, diverting the light’s path and causing it to orbit within the sphere. This change is recorded as a resonant dip in the trans-mission through the fiber. When a viral particle makes contact with the sphere, it changes the sphere’s properties, resulting in a detectable shift in resonance frequency.

The smaller the particle, the harder it is to record these changes. Viruses such as in-fluenza are fairly large and have been suc-cessfully detected with similar sensors in the past. But many viruses such as Polio are far smaller.

Arnold and his co-researchers achieved the required sensitivity by attaching gold na-no-receptors to the resonant microsphere that have been treated with specific mol-ecules that attract and bind proteins and viruses. These receptors are plasmonic, and thus enhance the electric field nearby, mak-ing even small disturbances easier to detect.

The researchers are setting their sights on detecting single proteins like antibodies, a major step toward early disease detection. “If we can identify and detect these single proteins,” Arnold said, “we can diagnose the presence of a virus far earlier, speeding treatment.” He continued, “This also opens up a new realm of possibilities in proteom-ics. All cancers generate markers, and if we have a test that can detect a single marker at the protein level, it doesn’t get more sen-sitive than that.” Arnold's research team has created a biosensor capable of identifying the smallest

single virus particle


NYU-Poly Researchers Detect Smallest Virus, Opening Possibilities for Early Disease Detection

FACULT Y NEWS AND RESEARCH

Keith Ross can find out who your friends are, where you live, if you’ve traveled recently, and even

if you’re sharing files. Ross is the Leonard J. Shustek professor of computer science and department head at NYU-Poly, and along with fellow researchers and stu-dents, he has uncovered Internet privacy flaws on major sites like Skype and Face-book. His findings stand to impact hun-dreds of millions of Internet users around the world, and his work has helped build Poly’s reputation as a hub for Internet pri-vacy research.

Last year, Ross teamed with colleagues in France and Germany to investigate poten-tial privacy flaws in Skype. Ross and his team uncovered vulnerabilities that per-mitted them to track users’ locations as well as their file-sharing activity on sites like BitTorrent.

The researchers detected and exploited a security gap that allowed them to place undetected Skype calls to users with a process that revealed users’ IP address-es. They then used commercial geo-IP mapping services to find users’ locations. Over two weeks, they successfully tracked 10,000 random users—just a fraction of the 170 million Skype users who place calls each month. “This flaw can be exploited by an un-sophisticated hacker with motivations ranging from the merely annoying—like a salesperson trying to build a marketing database —to the aggressive and con-cerning, like blackmail, stalking or fraud,” Ross explained.

As the Internet becomes increasingly central to communication, Ross sees the potential for a determined hacker to cre-ate highly detailed profiles of large num-bers of people. “By exploiting security gaps and targeting users with lax privacy settings, a tremendous amount of sensi-tive information can be exposed,” Ross explained. He said it was possible for someone “to cross reference personal in-formation from Facebook and combine it with details from web searches and sites like LinkedIn to uncover someone’s name, age, address, sexual orientation, employ-ment or health history.”

Later this year, Ross will take his research into the vulnerabilities of Facebook one step further, publishing the findings of a study to determine whether the site can be exploited to compile detailed profiles of minors.

“The goal of our work is to determine where the vulnerabilities are and to see how far we can push them,” Ross said. “We have to understand how deep the problem is to recommend solutions.”Ross acknowledges that these are some of the biggest Internet challenges of our time. And he and his colleagues are on the front lines, finding solutions.


Keith Ross: Exploring Internet Privacy

Ross, with fellow researchers, has uncovered Internet privacy flaws on major sites like Skype and Facebook

Researchers at NYU-Poly have assem-bled a powerful consortium of gov-ernment and business support to ad-

vance beyond today’s fourth generation (4G) wireless technologies toward 5G cellular networks that could potentially increase cell phone capacity by more than 1,000 times.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the team an Accelerating In-novation Research (AIR) grant of $800,000, matched by $1.2 million from corporate backers and the Empire State Development Division of Science, Technology & Innova-tion (NYSTAR), which supports the project through its longstanding partnership with NYU-Poly’s Center for Advanced Technol-ogy in Telecommunications (CATT). In-dustrial partners include InterDigital, Na-tional Instruments (NI) and faculty startup company Asension Laboratories.

“This new collaboration will significantly accelerate the progress towards 5G, and it exemplifies the power of NYU-Poly’s phi-losophy of i2e – invention, innovation and entrepreneurship,” said NYU-Poly Pres-ident Jerry M. Hultin. “The team is built of experienced faculty entrepreneurs and highly innovative researchers. Students will learn how to create products and compa-nies, working beside these professors and researchers from blue ribbon companies.”

The 5G project will develop smarter and far less expensive wireless infrastructure by means of smaller, lighter antennas with directional beam forming to bounce sig-nals off of buildings using the uncrowded millimeter-wave spectrum, where 50 to 100 times more user capacity is readily available. It will also help develop smaller, smarter cells with devices that cooperate rather than compete for spectrum.

“Bandwidth-hungry devices are doubling wireless spectrum demand every 12 to 18 months,” said Professor Shivendra Panwar, principal investigator on the 5G project, CATT director and professor in NYU-Po-ly’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “The 4G wireless networks in-creased the efficiency of spectrum usage, but this project pursues disruptive technologies that will significantly relieve the pressure.”

The move to the relatively unused and inex-pensive millimeter-wave spectrum is being led by Professor Theodore (Ted) Rappaport. The internationally recognized wireless ex-pert is co-principal investigator of the proj-ect and directs the NSF’s Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology (WICAT) at NYU-Poly, where most of the project’s re-search will be conducted.

“Millimeter wave communications are the next frontier of the wireless age,” predicted Rappaport, who is also a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Scienc-

FAC U LT Y N E WS A N D R E SE A RC H


Searching for 1,000 Times the Capacity of 4G Wireless

Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport

is the 2012 recipient of the

William E. Sayle Award for

Achievement in Education by

the Institute of Electrical and

Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Education Society. The

prestigious award is presented

annually to an IEEE

Education Society member

who has made significant

contributions in

engineering education.

CATT director Shivendra S. Panwar and WICAT director Ted Rappaport


Anne-Laure Fayard, assistant professor, Technology Management, has written a new book, The Power of Writing in Orga-nizations. The book details the power of writing in formal and informal organiza-tional settings and how organizations are affected when that power is lost.

Philip Maymin, assistant professor, Financial Risk and Engineering, wrote Financial Hacking, a new textbook to help evaluate risks, price derivatives, structured trades and build your intu-ition quickly and easily. He was the co-chair for the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Behavioral Finance and Economics on the NYU-Poly campus. The keynote speaker was Nobel Laureate in Economics Joseph Stiglitz.

Nasir Memon, professor, Computer Science and Engineering, is co-editor with Husrev Taha Sencar of Digital Image Forensics. The book covers techniques for forensic analysis of images, practical as-pects of image forensics and how digital pictures are created.

Jin Kim Montclare, an assistant profes-sor in Chemical and Biological Sciences, is the recent recipient of a grant from the Defense University Research Instru-mentation Program (DURIP), a highly competitive award that supports uni-versity-level research. The grants allow

institutions of higher learning to acquire the lab instrumentation necessary to carry out cutting-edge research for the Department of Defense (DoD).

Vladimir Tsifrinovich, lecturer, Applied Physics, recently published Creation of Two-Particle Entanglement in “Open Macroscopic Quantum Systems” in Advances in Mathematical Physics, and “Non-demolition Dispersive Measure-ment of a Superconducting Qubit with a Microstrip SQUID Amplifier” in Quan-tum Information and Computation.

Richard Wener, professor of environ-mental psychology, in Technology, Culture and Society, has written a book, The Environmental Psychology of Prisons and Jails, which examines the affects of correctional architecture on facility operations and the behavior of staff and inmates.

Professor of Physics Edward Wolf and doctoral candidate Manasa Medikonda co-authored Understanding the Nano-technology Revolution, which introduces the reader to the concepts and devices that approach the atomic scale in size, placing them in context of earlier scientific advances.

FACULT Y NOTES

Facu l ty Noteses and in the Department of Radiology at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Early equipment is already on the market, and major corporations are investing substan-tially in the technology. This 5G project will offer tremendous value to the $1 trillion cel-lular industry, including helping to develop standards that will enable others to acceler-ate their research.”

The project is supported by the NSF’s AIR program, which creates research alliances between existing NSF-funded consortia and partners from the world of business and entrepreneurship. These awards were designed to accelerate the innovation of products, processes and/or systems built upon the research foundations of each con-sortium. The WICAT center at NYU-Poly is among the largest industrial-academic consortia supported by NSF and includes the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Auburn University, and the University of Texas at Austin.

POLY BUZZ

Waiting for the convocation ceremony at the Polytech-nic Institute of New York

University (NYU-Poly) to begin, incom-ing first-year students filled rows of white folding chairs in the gym and chatted with anticipation. Among them were friends Valentina D’Costa and Divyaben Patel, who graduated from the same high school in Queens last spring. Patel said that she chose NYU-Poly because her older sister also attends and likes it. D’Costa said, “My mother inspired me to go for this. In In-dia, there’s not much opportunity for girls. That’s why we came to the U.S. My older sister is going into medicine, so I’m going into engineering.

Today’s Beginners, Tomorrow’s Leaders

“It’s been said by a friend of mine that talent is the oil of the 21st century,” said President Hultin in his opening remarks. “You are that talent.” Hultin exhorted students to combine traditional disciplines with new ways of thinking.

Incoming students, he said, will be in the prime years of their careers when Earth’s population reaches a predicted nine billion humans. Today’s eager first-year students—applying the school’s “i2e” approach: invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship—will someday graduate to become the scientists and engineers “inventing technologies for smarter cities

and infrastructure,” said Hultin, or “deliv-ering better healthcare.”

Hultin then introduced a notable grad-uate, the convocation’s keynote speaker: Fred Amoroso, who is an alumnus and the chairman of Yahoo!.

“Forty-five years ago, perhaps to this very day, I was sitting in your seats,” said Amoroso. “It all started here... In my first organic chemistry class, I [thought], ‘Well, what’s this new thing called systems engineering?’ It was about computers, and bridging the analog and digital.”

The rest, of course, is Amoroso’s well-known professional history. After receiv-

Convocation Welcomes Class of 2016


Left: A group of first-year students poses for a photo at the 2012 convocation ceremony held at NYU-Poly President; Right, from top to bottom: Amoroso; PIAA President Josiane Arbouet; President Hultin


ing a BS in systems engineering and an MS in operations research from NYU-Po-ly (then called the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn), Amoroso went on to play major roles in companies including Price Waterhouse (now Pricewaterhouse Coopers), IBM, CrossWorlds Software, Meta Group, Warburg Pincus, Rovi and, of course, Yahoo!.

Speaking to the relationships between innovation and business, Amoroso en-couraged new students to take advantage of every possible opportunity offered to them during their years at NYU-Poly. He ended his remarks with “Thinking,” a poem by Walter D. Wintle, which in-cludes the lines: “If you think you are out-

classed, you are / You’ve got to think high to rise / You’ve got to be sure of yourself before / You can ever win a prize.”

Following Amoroso’s keynote speech, he was awarded a prestigious honor: the Distinguished Alumni Award. The award was presented by Josiane Arbouet, presi-dent of the Polytechnic Institute Alumni Association.

The 2012 Jacobs Excellence in Education Award was also bestowed on Professors Tommy Lee (Chemical and Biological Sci-ences) and Allan Goldstein (Technology, Culture, and Society).

Lastly, the Nick Russo Award for Out-

standing General Engineering Design was awarded to 16 students.

The ceremony closed with remarks from Provost Katepalli Sreenivasan and a photo slideshow of incoming students’ responses to the question: What will YOU do? “I will engineer the next best gadget,” wrote one student. “I will har-monize innovation with conservation,” was another’s reply. “I will chase the life I really want,” wrote a third. And a fourth: “I will change the world.”

POLY BUZZ

The Center for K-12 STEM Education at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) focuses on pro-viding science, technology, engineering and mathematics — the so-called “STEM” disciplines — to K-12 students and teach-ers. In the final week of its month-long Science of Smart Cities (SoSC) program, the center’s 36 middle school participants were treated to a field trip at the downtown Brooklyn offices of Northrop Grumman, a leading global security company. Each week addressed a different theme in con-temporary urban topics (energy, transpor-tation, communication, and food and sus-tenance) until students were encouraged to build a “smart city” of their own.

“From Poly’s perspective, this day is a mod-el,” said Ben Esner, Director of the Center. “We don’t want to just call faculty to give a talk. We want companies to be engaged in teaching what they know.”

Northrop Grumman engineers focused their instruction on the wireless commu-nication technology benefitting not just consumers, but also the public sector. The presentations were followed by interactive workshops led by Northrop Grumman em-ployees. At one, manager Stephen Cahn-mann talked about modems that could solve traffic issues and streamline cities’ disaster response systems. The high level of engagement from his audience gave him hope for the field’s future workforce. “It’s crucial to keep a fresh pipeline of the ones who will have the next big idea,” he said.

The day concluded with a Think Tank Activity, which asked students to work in groups to develop an application to make their city function better or “smarter.” Part-nered with a company engineer, each group came up with applications or presentation to a panel of judges from Northrop Grum-man and New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommu-nications (DoITT), who scored the presen-tations on criteria such as the clarity and creativity of the application, as well as its cost or feasibility.

Eventually a winner was decided: a group that proposed bringing WiFi to subway platforms by taking advantage of commu-nications systems already in place.

Students at NYU-Poly and alumni were similarly rewarded. Instructors of the SoSC program—all students at NYU-Poly—guided the middle schoolers on a weekly basis. Program director Dominick Den-nisur, a mechanical engineering student

at NYU-Poly, said, “The group definitely experienced our fair share of challenges, but staying in the classrooms late into the night preparing activities for the week was all worth it when seeing the joy on the stu-dents’ faces when they did those activities.”

For instructor Howard Jiang, a senior in civil engineering, the program was “a game changer when it comes to personal growth. It allowed me to develop a new level of confidence and ability to communicate en-gineering and scientific principles,” he said. The most meaningful part of the experi-ence for Jiang, though, was sharing his love of engineering with students.

Jiang may be pleased to know that his charges began to imagine possible futures as engineers. “We made a wireless car. Makes me want to be an engineer,” said Stiven, 12.

“It feels like I already am an engineer,” his classmate Ezron, 13, chimed in.

Students Discover the Science Behind Smart Cities

Polytechnic Institute of New York Uni-versity President Jerry Hultin listens to participants describe their project at the final presentation ceremony marking the camp's end


POLY BUZZ


“You are going to be needed,” Jerry M. Hultin, President of the Polytechnic In-stitute of New York University (NYU-Po-ly), told students in the Pfizer Auditori-um at the second Sloan Cyber Security Lecture. In his opening remarks, Hultin stressed a simple point: a career in cyber security equals job security. Hultin also called for more women to consider it, citing the day’s Distinguished Lecturer, Debora Plunkett, Director of the Infor-mation Assurance Directorate for the National Security Agency, as an example. “She has a career we can all try to emu-late,” Hultin said.

In her lecture, Plunkett echoed the sen-timent: “I need fresh legs, and I see a lot of them here in the room.” Plunkett,

whose role involves defending national security systems, addressed emerging cyber security threats and mitigation strategy: with more technology used every day, “the more we need to protect it.” She focused on defining emerging threats, why we should study them, and “what opportunities exist for you as you leave this institution and go out into the work world.”

Her concluding remarks emphasized the broad spectrum of new and growing threats, and that effective response strat-egies must target both the attacker and defender motivations. Academia and business must work together to respond effectively, crossing lines between “gov-ernment, industry, and infrastructure.”

A panel discussion featuring Hamilton William J. Wansley, Senior VP at Booz Allen, and Bill Phelps, a Managing Di-rector in Accenture’s security practice, followed the lecture. During the panel, moderated by Professor Nasir Memon, Phelps echoed Plunkett’s call to protect-ing cyberspace: we need to “build a fence to keep people out,” moving beyond de-fense. “For all the students, you’re in a great place,” he said. “There is zero un-employment in cyber security.”

In the hallway outside the Pfizer audito-rium, students displayed posters high-lighting their research in cyber security and dealing with threats and attacks. “Survivable Key Compromise in Software Update Systems,” by a group of students including NYU-Poly Vladimir Diaz and Konstantin Andrianov demonstrated the danger of compromise in software up-dates via a chart with principles for “De-signing for Survivability.”

Jeyavijayan (JV) Rajendran, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is re-searching Integrated Circuit Security, said “The Sloan lecture was great,” Ra-jendran added. It gave him “excellent feedback about our research” and “an experience about how to convey our research ideas effectively to others who might not be aware of that problem.”

“There’s a huge demand for cy-ber security right now, across the board,” said James Sillcox, Director of NYU-Poly’s Wasserman Center for Career Development. “The problems evolve and the solutions evolve with them. There’s an unmatched demand from this industry.”

Securing Our Future in Cyberspace and the Workplace

Ubell Is MayadasRecipient Robert Ubell, vice president, Enter-prise Learning, is the 2012 recipient of the Sloan-C Mayadas Leadership Award. This prestigious award is given to an individual who demon-strates “extraordinary leadership in conceptualizing and implementing transformative models of online and blended learning having a national impact.” Bob’s oversight of e-learn-ing at NYU-Poly has earned the pro-gram the Sloan Consortium Online Program Award and recognition by U.S. News and World Report’s first-time ranking of graduate online programs—third in Student Services and Technology and fifth in Student Engagement and Accreditation.


Jeyavijayan Rajendran is used to winning.

Last year, he placed third in IT Security in the Kaspersky American Cup at NYU-Poly; secured the Myron M. Rosenthal Award for Best MS Academic Achievement in the De-partment of Electrical and Computer En-gineering; and walked away with Best Stu-dent Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on VLSI (Very Large Scale In-tegration) Design, among other honors. And the second-year doctoral candidate advanced to the final round of the presti-gious Association for Computing Machin-ery (ACM) Student Research Competition.

Rajendran’s work on encryption-based se-curity of integrated circuits puts him and NYU-Poly at the forefront of microchip security at a time when the United States faces a veritable flood of “mystery meat” microchips and other hardware that are typically manufactured abroad. At issue are chips pre-loaded by the manufacturer with malware that can be operated remotely to

steal data, perform espionage and compro-mise systems.

The U.S. military is now deeply immersed in unraveling this microchip knot partly because the Pentagon doesn’t control who creates the thousands of chips that go into everything from radar systems to stealth fighters. Even civilian manufacturers have this problem. The semiconductor industry loses an estimated $4 billion per year due to piracy and malware.

Rajendran’s project, “Securing Integrat-ed Circuits through Logic Encryption,” focuses on ways to expose weaknesses in hardware encryption defenses and then fix them. “While there were many efforts in concealing hardware designs through log-ic obfuscation, we proposed the first attack on these techniques and also came up with defense techniques to thwart our proposed attack,” he says. “We used the principles from a different hardware field which fo-cuses on screening hardware for defects.”

Rajendran, who studies under Professor Ra-mesh Karri, says his project borrows from technology used for testing manufacturer defects in microchips, and applies it to test-ing the strength of security encryption.

“I basically took those techniques and ap-plied them to create an attack platform for testing security. It’s a way to ‘attack’ a sys-tem first by teasing out the ‘recipe’ from the code that was added to conceal it,” he says. “In the attacker’s role, I can see the weak links: I can see which part is difficult to subvert, and which is easy.”

Rajendran was one of 20 students from around the world selected during the first round of the competition sponsored by Microsoft Research. He progressed through two more rounds to become one of three winners selected in San Francis-co. He now advances to the Grand Finals in June 2013.

POLY BUZZ

Hacking His Way to the Grand Finals


Rajendran (center) at least year's CSAW held annually at NYU-Poly

CABLE | Fall 2012 37cable.poly.edu CABLE | Fall 2012 37cable.poly.edu

ALUMNI NEWSALUMNI PRESIDENT'S LET TER

Dear Alumni,

Thankfully, many of you have responded positively to our appeal and as a result, our leadership will

be addressing your recommendations and input over the next few weeks. You are always welcome to contact us at [email protected]. Your continued feedback and financial sup-port is important to us. Therefore, over the coming weeks, our alumni association will be reaching out to you via the NYU-Poly Office of Alumni Relations to seek your comments on the new benefits programs, to gauge your interest in new services and activities or to simply invite you to volun-teer to join one of our committees at http://www.poly.edu/PIAA/committees. Speaking of committees, I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate both: our PIAA Awards committee who wisely selected Fred Amoroso, several months

ago, as the recipient of the 2012 Dis-tinguished Alumnus Award; as well as Fred Amoroso ‘71BS, '73MS for the extraordinary achievement of his recent ap-pointment as chairman of the Board of Directors of Yahoo! We also congratulate Mi-chael Urmeneta, executive vice-president of the PIAA as the recipient of the 2012 Dedicated Alumnus Award acknowledging his 20 years of volunteer service to our alumni asso-ciation. We hope that you will once again take part in our awards activities and submit your recommendations for the 2013 Distinguished Alumni Awards at http://www.poly.edu/PIAA/awards.

During our Polytechnic Institute Alumni Association Annual (PIAA) Meeting on June 3, we highlighted the fact that our association is only as vibrant as your participation in our alumni activities and welcomed your proposals and suggestions on how we can better meet your needs as either recent alumni, entrepreneurs, mid-career professionals, retirees or inspiring global leaders.

Josiane Arbouet '96JT '99IYPIAA President

ALUMNI NEWS

Long before NYU-Poly coined the concept of i2e—the interplay of in-vention, innovation and entrepre-

neurship—a 23-year-old immigrant and former Olympic skier enrolled in the uni-versity. It was 1949, and the name Paul So-ros was not yet synonymous with engineer-ing ingenuity and entrepreneurial genius. In fewer than eight years, Soros’ world—and the global shipping and transportation industry—would be transformed forever.

Soros came to the United States from Hun-gary, following a childhood and early adult life that was the stuff of both dreams and nightmares. During World War II, Soros and his family—father Tivador, mother Bozsi and brother George—left behind a comfortable life of privilege, dodging Nazi deportation by living separately in Bu-dapest under false identities. While their strategy kept the family safe until the Rus-sian siege of the city in 1945, it did not help Paul escape capture by the Russian military police. As a military aged young man he became a prisoner of war. While in transit to Russia he escaped, risking his life.

When the university reopened he became a student in mechanical engineering. As a member of the Hungarian national ski team he spent the winters on the interna-tional ski racing circuit throughout Eu-rope. But political developments again forced Paul to consider a major – and risky – life change. He described his decision to leave Hungary following the Communist takeover in 1947 as a crucial one saying ‘I hated the totalitarian set up so much, I had to get out’.

Given a passport to participate in the 1948 Winter Olympic Games in Switzerland gave him the opportunity to defect. He moved to

Salzburg in the American occupied zone of Austria, applied for graduate study and was accepted by Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy. He came to the US on a student visa at Christmas 1948 and he arrived in Man-hattan with $17 and a Leica camera that he sold. “I simply had no time to think about what would happen next, I just knew it would be alright,” he remembers.

He spent the winter of 1949 on a skiing scholarship at St. Lawrence University and the summer as a tennis-pro in the Adiron-dacks and eventually saved $1,500 to fur-ther his engineering education. A family friend, Tamas Bardos, encouraged Soros to consider applying to Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he was an adjunct fac-ulty member in the chemistry department.

Soros followed Bardos’ advice and ul-timately chose to attend Poly, attracted both by its long history of innovation in engineering and by the chance to get a

high-quality education affordably. During his time at Poly, he was introduced to a professor whose words would soon moti-vate and embolden him to become an en-trepreneur. Soros recalls Professor Arias, who taught Engineering Economics, tell-ing his students “if you didn’t have a clear career path by age 30, you would never be successful.” Soros was 23 at the time.

After receiving a Master of Mechanical Engineering degree in 1950 he worked for a year for a heavy construction compa-ny and then became a sales engineer for Hewitt-Robins, an international manu-facturer of bulk material-handling equip-ment, at a salary of $400 a month. He mar-ried Daisy – a fellow Hungarian whom he met at International House – and traveled the world on business and was on track to become a senior executive.

On a business trip to Chile Soros had met a group of Hungarians who owned an iron ore mining company that needed a load-


Soros, who transformed the global shipping and transportation industry, was honored at this spring's i2e Gala

Paul Soros: A Life Not Hindered by “What If?”

ALUMNI NEWS

ing port but couldn’t afford the estimated $2 million price tag. They joked with Soros that if he could build a port for $1 million they would be interested. Paul spent the summers of his childhood at their sum-merhouse on an island in the Danube next to the passenger terminal. He watched hundreds of ships dock and un-dock and used to sit with other kids on the mooring lines. Seeing who got lifted, when and how high and how fast gave him an insight on the behavior of mooring systems. He came up with the idea that holding the ships with mooring buoys, rather than tying it to fixed marine structures, would work and require less initial investment. He remembered the words of Professor Arias and he took the plunge, tendering his resignation from Hewitt-Robins at exactly age 30.

Soros Associates was founded as a one-man operation with one client – with the potential to become a global business if the project was successful.

Years later, when asked about the courage needed to strike out on his own, leave a comfortable salary and start his own busi-ness, Soros seemed unfazed. “The most serious challenges were behind me by the time I was 22,” he said.

The same principle, mooring buoys instead of fixed structures, made it possible to load and unload ships in rough seas where it was not feasible to tie the ships to fixed structures. The first port of this type was at Port Latta, Tasmania, one mile offshore. This project won the American Consulting Engineering Council’s Annual Engineer-ing Excellence Competition in 1968, as did other Soros projects in 17 following years.

The unique combination of his engineer-ing background, knowledge of the materi-als handling industry, and maritime know-how had guided Soros in a new engineering

specialty. Before the first project was even completed in Chile word had spread that Soros Associates had cracked the code and could build bulk ports for less and received orders for two new ports in Chile. The business grew quickly, and continued to expand as Soros introduced technological innovations that produced significant re-ductions in the capital and operating costs of very high capacity installations. Eventu-ally Soros Associates worked in 90 coun-tries and was responsible for engineering the highest capacity ports in the world for iron ore, coal, bauxite, and aluminum. He received the Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award form the National So-ciety of Professional Engineers in 1999, the Grant Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2000 and hon-orary doctorates from Bates College, City College, and NYU-Poly.

More than 60 years after his graduation from Poly, Soros was honored at the In-augural i2e Gala, celebrating the spirit of entrepreneurship and the promising work of student innovators. In a video address to a crowd of more than 300, Soros shared a piece of wisdom that, not unlike the advice he received at a young age, will stay with students for a lifetime.

He recalled being at a crossroads while at Hewitt-Robins, faced with the decision of whether to stay or start his own business. “I felt, if I didn’t try to do something as an en-trepreneur, I’d be stuck as an executive and I would always be bothered by ‘what if ’,” So-ros said. “My advice to students who have a desire to do something as an entrepreneur is to do it. Otherwise you will never find out.”

Paul Soros has described his life as “riches to rags to riches again,” and remains pas-sionate about the role of a quality educa-tion in helping young people create oppor-tunities and achieve success.

In addition to the family’s generous gifts to NYU-Poly, including major gifts in sup-port of the Department of Chemical Engi-neering and seed funding to start a novel graduate program in financial engineering, the family established the Paul and Dai-sy Soros Fellowships for New Americans in 1997. Now a $75-million program, the Fellowship awards 30 annual fellowships to immigrants or children of immigrants with grants of $90,000 toward tuition and living expenses for two years of graduate study.

“The idea of having a building with our name on it didn’t appeal to us,” said Soros, remark-ing on his interest in placing a philanthropic emphasis on education. “ I was hoping these Fellows would make a real contribution to American culture and economy.”

The diverse successes of former Soros Fel-lows speaks to a dream fulfilled. They have become entrepreneurs, acclaimed music composers, White House lawyers, teachers and medical researchers.

This year, NYU-Poly established the Soros Prize for Creative Engineering, honoring up to three undergraduate or graduate me-chanical or civil engineering students who devise a standout, innovative design idea or invention.

In his closing comments to NYU-Poly students at the i2e Gala earlier this spring, the visionary engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist issued a reassuring prom-ise. “If you’re able to spend your working hours on something that is stimulating or interesting,” he said, “you will have a great life, regardless of money or any-thing else.”


Computers today are true thinking machines, with the ability to weigh and decide among alternatives, al-

most as people do. That is possible due in large part to the work of Judea Pearl, who received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic in 1965. While his disser-tation was on superconducting currents, and led to the discovery of what physicists call today the “Pearl vortex,” his later work has focused on artificial intelligence (AI). Dr. Pearl was recently recognized for his “fundamental contributions to artificial in-telligence through the development of a cal-culus for probabilistic and causal reasoning” with the 2011 A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. This prestigious award, named after computer pi-oneer Alan Turing, is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computing, and has previ-ously gone to such pioneers and luminaries in the field as Herbert Simon, John McCar-thy and Donald Knuth. Dr. Pearl’s work made it possible to process information and draw conclusions despite uncertainty, through his invention of Bayes-ian networks, a mathematical way to define complex probability models. This not only revolutionized the field of AI but became an important tool for many other branches of engineering and the natural and social sci-ences—among them computational biology, statistics, philosophy, and human genetics—all of which have one thing in common: explaining and drawing conclusions from noisy data and uncertain knowledge.

His work has also enabled the construction of robots that are able to use algorithms to imagine alternatives, assess potential sce-narios and draw defensible conclusions. Applications such as search engines, voice recognition, image understanding and text

comprehension depend on these theories. Dr. Pearl admits to being both pleased and surprised at being awarded the Turing, since his main research is not considered main-stream computer science, he says. “My work has more to do with human cognition and the logic of scientific thinking than with making computers more powerful.” The Israeli-born and- educated Pearl chose Polytechnic University because it “had quite a reputation in Israel,” where he received his BS degree in 1960 from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. “Poly’s Micro-wave Research Institute was one of the most sought-after post-graduate schools among Technion’s students,” he notes. But the crit-

ical factor was the flexibility he was allowed to pursue his PhD thesis while working full-time at the RCA research laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked on superconducting memories. In 1969, he began teaching at the University of Cal-ifornia, Los Angeles, where he founded the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. The author of hundreds of technical papers and several influential books, he is also the recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, includ-ing the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Com-puters and Cognitive Science and election to the American Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the IEEE AI Hall of Fame.

In 2007, Pearl received an honorary doctor-ate from the University of Toronto. In his commencement speech, he said scientists like Galileo were his heroes, “because Galileo showed that to be a scientist you must have both respect for the truth, and the audacity to believe that you can find it… Truth can be elusive, even in our times, covered by the heavy fog of fear and hidden agenda. It is only after the murder of my son, Danny, that I came to appreciate how hard it is, even in the age of Internet, to stay the course of truth.”

Part of his $250,000 Turing award money will support the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which was founded by Pearl and his wife, Ruth, and named in honor of their son, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was mur-dered in Pakistan in 2002. The foundation began with the intention to promote Dan-iel’s values of “uncompromised objectivity and integrity; insightful and unconventional perspective; tolerance and respect for people of all cultures; unshaken belief in the effec-tiveness of education and communication; and the love of music, humor, and friend-ship.” Its mission is to promote cross-cultur-al understanding through journalism, music and dialogue, and to roll back the ideology of hatred that took Daniel’s life. Another part of the prize will go to introduce causal anal-ysis in college education.

To young people and Poly students, his advice is: “Do not take no for an answer, question the ruling paradigms of your teachers, and, even if you do not prove them wrong, you are sure to find some powerful tools along the way.” He adds that “I would like to be remembered as a scientist who helped Israel climb to third place in the number of Turing Award win-ners (after the U.S. and the UK) and thus paid back some of the debt I owe to a coun-try that invested so dearly in my education and intellectual making.”


ALUMNI NEWS

A Prize for Pearl


ALUMNI NEWS

Father Valery Lukianov ’55CE is most likely the only priest ever to engineer and build his own

cathedral. Decades before building his church, however, the Shanghai-born Russian Orthodox priest began an immigrant’s journey that took him halfway around the world.

His father, after fighting in the Russian Army during World War I, served with the anti-communist White Army, which was defeated during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922). His parents and other White Army survivors fled Russia and were given refuge in Shanghai. After high school, Valery began engineering studies in Shanghai at Universite l’Aurore. One year later he was hired as a civilian motor-pool dispatcher by the U.S. Navy in Shanghai.

“In 1948, when China was being taken over by communist forces, my parents immigrated to the United States to join my sister and settle in New York,” Father Lukianov said. “I was twenty-one, an adult, and there were no openings in the U.S. immigration quota for people born in China. So I was evacuated to the Philippines, just before Shanghai fell.” In 1950, he finally arrived in the U.S. to join his parents and sister. Six months later he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – in statistics at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and in cartography at an American Army base in Orleans, France.

In 1955, after resuming studies at Poly on the recommendation of a relative and graduating cum laude, he began his professional life as a designer of oil-refinery structures. Later, he earned his professional engineering license and was hired by a

Long Island company that designed public and commercial buildings – experience that would serve him well later.

Continuing to work as an engineer – and inspired by his devoutly religious parents – he entered the diaconate in 1963 and was ordained a priest in 1967. Preferring to keep his ordination a private matter, he continued working as an engineer for almost two years, until 1968, when he was assigned to become rector of St. Alexander Nevsky Church in Howell, New Jersey. There, he and his wife, Irene, raised their five sons.

Father Lukianov meshed engineering with his religious life when he began to build a larger church for his growing parish. Ground was broken in 1989. To stay within budget, he undertook the engineering and construction himself. “Frankly, it was a great risk,” he said. “I had been involved in the design of large structures, but I lacked deep field experience… I could never have done it by just being daring. I believe God put my faith to the test. We faced immense difficulties. But it was joyous to see the edifice take shape, and with God’s help we completed it soundly and meticulously. In 1997, after we installed 12 bronze bells from Holland, frescoes and carved, gilded ornamentation, the cathedral was consecrated in a sumptuous ceremony with seven bishops and dozens of priests officiating.”

Father Lukianov has published a six-volume collection of spiritual, historical and liturgical works in Russian and English. His best-known book, Lantern of Grace, chronicles the canonization of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco (1896–1966), a noted Eastern Orthodox ascetic, a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

From campus days, Father Lukianov holds an indelible memory, a bit of advice from a history professor that seems to have informed his own life. “He told our class, ‘Remember, you did not come here to learn how to become rich. You came here to acquire knowledge needed to make life better and to help others.”

Father Valery Lukianov: Engineer-Priest Who Built His Russian Orthodox Cathedral

Father Valery Lukianov blesses the site of the new St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral at the ground-breaking in 1990

A thousand years ago, conventional wisdom was that the world was flat. That doesn’t mean it was

true,” said Daniel Rose, chairman of real estate organization Rose Associates and founder of the acclaimed Harlem Edu-cational Activities Fund (HEAF). Rose’s approach to education, one rooted “not in teaching, which is what takes place on a blackboard, but on learning, which is what happens inside the mind of a young person” bucks most of the conventions of today’s classrooms, but Rose wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rose and his wife, Joanna, founded HEAF more than 20 years ago to change the lives of inner-city middle and high

school students, setting them on a path for success through after-school, Satur-day and summer enrichment activities. The program, which has nurtured the curiosity, encouraged high aspirations and built self-confidence in thousands of young people—most of them minorities—boasts extraordinary results: 100 percent of HEAF students graduate from high school, 94 percent graduate from college and more than a third go on to earn mas-ter’s degrees.

Now, the Rose family is poised to expand the success of HEAF through a partner-ship with NYU-Poly, pledging $600,000 to provide opportunities for HEAF students to attend the university through the Dan-

iel and Joanna Rose STEM Scholarship Fund. For Rose, it’s a natural next step. “HEAF has done the heavy lifting—it’s like the first stage of a space shuttle launch. We’ve launched these kids up over the treetops, but now we’ve got to boost them the rest of the way,” he explained.

Over the next five years, NYU-Poly will name five Rose STEM Scholars, awarding full undergraduate scholarships to one

HEAF graduate each year. The award will cover tuition, on-campus living expenses and participation in study abroad and internship programs. Rose STEM Scholars will also serve as mentors for HEAF stu-dents. Additionally, the funds will provide opportunities for NYU-Poly graduate students and faculty to conduct robotics lessons with HEAF staff and students throughout the year.

For Daniel Rose, who was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering from NYU-Poly in 2007, investing in the edu-cation of future scientists and engineers is critical. “In the 21st century, science and technology are part of the world in a way that touches everyone. And for those stu-dents who hear the music of science, we want to provide them with every possible opportunity.”

He goes on to relay the story of the only graduating college class in history to turn out three Nobel laureates. “It was the City College of New York Class of 1937. The facilities were shabby. The classes were huge. The students came from mostly poor, immigrant families. But they were future-minded, and they valued education as a way to achieve their goals.”

As Rose looks to the future of programs like HEAF, he only sees growth—and he views partners like NYU-Poly as crucial to the process. “In the real world, you cannot count on equal results, but you can provide equality in opportunity so ev-ery child can grow to their fullest height,” he said. “And for those among us who have it within them to become sequoias, so be it.”

A Natural BoostDaniel and Joanna Rose Found Scholarship Fund


ALUMNI NEWS

“

Sleep Tight


ALUMNI NEWS

When Rahul Gautam '76CE was working towards his under-graduate degree in chemical

engineering at the Indian Institute of Tech-nology, Kanpur—some 250 miles from the corporate headquarters of Sheela Foam, the polyurethane foam manufacturer he went on to found with his mother, Sheela Gautam, in 1971—he probably couldn't have imagined that he would one day be managing director of India's largest foam producer. But then, he might not have imagined that he and his mother would go into business together at all, much less pioneer the development of a product that was almost entirely new to the Indian market.

"We didn't have a business background," Gautam explained by phone from his firm's offices in Ghaziabad, an industrial town just outside New Delhi. "My father was in the Army, and my mother was a housewife."

Nonetheless, when his father, Lt. Col. H.S. Gautam, died in 1969, the government grant-ed his mother a license to manufacture foam. (In addition to her business career, Sheela Gautam would go on to serve four terms as a representative in the Indian parliament.) In what was then a largely state-run economy, such business licenses were highly prized. But this one turned out to be a mixed blessing.

Gautam certainly had the knowledge and skills to build a foam manufacturing line from the ground up: after earning his bach-elor's in chemical engineering from one of India's top technical schools, he seized the opportunity to acquire a graduate degree in the same field from a leading foreign univer-sity—NYU-Poly.

"I knew about the chemical engineering pro-gram at Poly, and they offered me a tuition

waiver and an assistantship," he recalls. "The impact was absolutely huge. I had the oppor-tunity to study with some excellent profes-sors, and to teach undergraduates. The teach-ing part turned out to be the biggest learning experience, because I had to prepare first."

Despite his engineering skills, however, es-tablishing a market for what was at the time a novel commodity in India was no small challenge. "No one knew about foam; it was completely unknown to the market," says Gautam. "So it was a bit of a struggle for the first 10 to 12 years."

Yet when the Indian economy began to ex-pand in the 1980s, so did Sheela Foam. At first, the company produced foam exclusive-ly for industrial applications such as sound and heat absorption. In the 1990s, as the Indian government moved to liberalize the economy, the firm moved into foam mat-tresses. Today, 60 percent of its revenues come from bedding, and its Sleepwell brand leads the Indian mattress market. (Sheela Foam also owns Joyce, the largest foam man-ufacturer in Australia.)

That growth was hard-won. Transporting foam is expensive: the material is both volu-minous and fragile, and in a large developing country with relatively poor infrastructure, the Gautams quickly realized they would need to manufacture their product as close as possible to local markets in order to min-imize costs and maximize distribution. As a result, Sheela Foam now has seven of its own factories, and approximately 4,000 distribu-tors, around India.

More recently, Gautam and his head of IT determined that the firm's legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was ham-pering its performance. That led to a tech

overhaul that resulted in greatly improved operating efficiency and earned the compa-ny plaudits from regional media.

The company is also ahead of the curve when it comes to health and safety. Isocya-nates, a key ingredient in the manufacture of polyurethane, can be highly hazardous; and despite improvements, production stan-dards in India remain patchy.

"As far as the laws of the land are concerned, they are similar to those of any developed country—but the implementation is very poor," says Gautam.

Sheela Foam, which is ISO-certified, has sought to improve its own practices for deal-ing with hazardous chemicals and to invest in the latest, most environmentally sound equipment. "We do a little more than what is necessary from our end," says Gautam, adding that "we have the technology, and we have the know-how." Some of the firm's products, most notably the ones manufactured by its Austra-lian subsidiary, Joyce, and those it makes in collaboration with Woodbridge, a Canadian company with which it produces car seats, are also considered environmentally friendly.

The recent global economic downturn has not left India untouched, and the compa-ny's distributors have long found it difficult to reach the smaller towns and villages that comprise so much of the Indian market. But Gautam is currently working to build a larg-er fleet of trucks that can travel directly into those harder-to-reach areas, and he expects to see a strong return on that investment within the next few years.

"The need for the product is there," he says. "We just need to make it available and affordable.

We worked with Neil Armstrong, U.S. astronaut, and fellow crewmen Buzz

Aldrin and Michael Collins for almost seven years at the NASA resident office for Project Apollo at the Grumman Aerospace Corp., designing, building and testing the Lunar Module (LM). The LM was the first and only manned spaceship to land men on the moon. Neil was a gentleman, a U.S. Navy combat pilot, a test pilot of advanced aircraft design, a great technician and engineer, a professor, an Astronaut and a patriot. He served the United States well during the dark days of the Korean War and the Cold War, when we competed with Soviet communism for supremacy in space, and we won, technically, economically and politically. Neil will be greatly missed by his family, friends, NASA, supplier contractors, Grumman, coworkers and other astronauts. The Eagle has landed.

Goodbye, Neil, and God speed on your next journey.

Submitted by Poly aerospace engineers:• Robert Zuckerman, Structures

and Dynamics• Anthony Liccardi, Manager• Walter Gaylor, Chief Engineer• Frederick A. Zito, Guidance

and Navigation• Robert Newlander, Project Engineer

ObituaryAnthony J. Wiener, professor emeritus of management, and noted futurist, died on June 19. He was 81 years old and resided in Closter, New Jersey.

He joined Polytechnic University (now Poly-technic Institute of New York University) in 1975. He worked with George Schillinger to develop Poly’s Management of Technology program and served as the program’s deputy director. During his tenure, he was also head of the Department of Management.

Wiener and Herman Kahn co-authored “The Year 2000: A Framework for Spec-ulation on the Next Thirty-three Years”, a

study detailing forecasts for the year 2000. Several of his predictions including home computers, cell phones, online banking, video conferencing, 3D movies, and artifi-cial organs and limbs came to fruition. The book was considered a milestone in 1960s futurism and used an eclectic combination of elemental sources—from Aristotle to statistical analysis-- to support its theories.

In the book’s writing, Wiener explained he was most interested in “reducing the role of thoughtlessness in societal choic-es.” Wiener was a founding member of the Hudson Institute, along with Kahn and Max Singer. The “think tank” earned a reputation for supporting Kahn’s theories on nuclear cataclysm. Wiener served as

chair of the institute’s Research Council.

A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Wiener served as a consultant on the future to several clients including the Stanford Research Institute, NASA, and Shell Oil. He also worked as an aide to the late NY Senator Patrick Moynihan on urban policy during the Nixon Administration.

He is survived by his wife, Deborah (nee Zaidner) and their children, Adam and Carol; children by his late first wife, Hel-ga (nee Gerschenkron), Jonathan and Lisa; and three grandchildren.

Taken from The New York Times.


EventsNovember 8, 2012:Bowling in Boston with Professor Mary Cowman at Lucky Strike in Boston, MA,6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

November 13, 2012:PIAA Leadership Meeting – NYU-Poly, 15 MetroTech Center, 6th floor-Hospitality Suite, Brooklyn, NY January 22, 2013: PIAA Leadership Meeting – NYU –Poly, 15 MetroTech Center, 6th floor- Hospitality Suite, Brooklyn, NY

February 28, 2013:Orlando Alumni Gathering in Orlando, FLPlace and time to be announced. April 16, 2013:PIAA Leadership Meeting – NYU-Poly, 15 MetroTech Center, 6th floor-Hospitality Suite, Brooklyn, NY

EVENT S, IN MEMORIAM, OBITUARY, CL ASS NOTES

In Memory of Neil Armstrong,U.S. Astronaut, 1930-2012


Class NotesLawrence J. Lauck ’42ME was 91 in January.

Earl W. Ross ’46MT is retired from GE Aircraft Engines as a principal metallurgist for super alloys. He has received nine U.S. patents on turbine airfoil alloys. Mr. Ross is thankful for the late Professor Otto Henry, who brought in industry experts to teach metallurgical courses to undergraduates.

Jagdish Agarwal ’47CH retired from Charles River Associates as vice president after over 60 years of industry and consult-ing experience in business and technology assessment. He is currently an angel inves-tor in the green energy sector.

Geoffrey W. Fuchs ’48ME has been retired since 1986 and is active with “The Second Half ”, a lifelong learning institute of UMa-ss-Dartmouth. He received an MBA from the Ivy in 1980. He and his wife, Rheita, became great-grandparents this year.

Daniel Shybunko ’55CE is the CEO of GSE Dynamics, Inc.

Paul Schnitzler ’57EE ’59EE ’69EE gives keynote addresses on “Making Change Successful,” which explains the 70% fail-ure rate of change initiatives. His talks have been delivered throughout the United States and China.

Martin J. Weissman ’58IE and his wife have been retired for several years and live near Oneonta, NY. Martin and his wife were actuaries working on employee benefits, pensions and retirement plans.

Richard M. Frauenglass ’61EE ’68EE was a finalist in the Flame Challenge, a worldwide contest that asked scientists to explain a flame in terms that would

engage an 11-year-old. The event, host-ed by the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, took place at the World Science Festival in New York.

Frank M. Labianca ’61 ’63 ’67EE and his wife, Grace Ann, became grandparents for the fourth time in September.

Lawrence Narici ’62EE co-authored the second edition of “Topological Vector Spaces,” published in 2011, with Edward Beckenstein ’62 EE.

Harvey N. Seiger ’62CM recently pub-lished a paper, “The Confluence of Far-aday’s and Kirchoff ’s Laws in Bioelec-trochemical Systems,” in The Scientific World Journal.

Paul J. Sutton ’62ME and his partner of 40 years, Barry G. Magidoff, have expand-ed their Sutton Magidoff LLP patent and intellectual property boutique law firm.

Alan M. Holzberg ’64CH ’66MG retired from ExxonMobil Chemical Company in 2003. He is currently the vice president of outreach for Sight Into Sound. He also does mediations for the Dispute Resolution Corp. (DRC) and arbitrations for FINRA.

Gene A. Herber ’66AE retired from Sch-weizer Aircraft after 34 years of service.

Vincent N. Martella ’66ME and his wife, Jean, celebrated the birth of their first granddaughter, Olivia.

Ronald M. Miller ’66 ’69EE is the pres-ident of Miller Technical Group LLC, a management consulting company. He enjoys researching his family genealogy and spending time with his grandchil-dren and wife of 46 years, Carole.Patrick J. Byrne ’67IE is enjoying re-

tirement with his wife, Anne, and eight young grandchildren. He is chairman of the Board of the Rockland Community Foundation, a non-profit helping the cit-izens of Rockland, NY

Norman J. Cooperman P. E. ’67 ’73EE has been elected to the board of directors of the Philharmonic of Southern New Jersey. Cooperman will serve as techni-cal production consultant and corporate development coordinator. He is look-ing forward to the challenge of apply-ing his technical expertise to upgrading the wireless audio system for those with hearing deficiencies.

Bernard Monahan ’67CE co-authored McGraw-Hill’s third edition of The Hand-book of Temporary Structures in Con-struction, which features engineering stan-dards, designs, practices, and procedures.

Bob Franco ’69MT retired recently from ExxonMobil Production Corporation after 43 years of service in metallurgical and corrosion engineering.

Jonathan Marsh ’69MA retired to his farm.

Charles Weliky ’69EE ’71OR retired from Con Edison in 2008 after a 40-year career. HE was CEO of Con Edison Ener-gy and Con Edison Development- Com-petitive Subsidiaries of Con Edison of New York. He is currently a non-execu-tive COB of Everpower Wind Holdings.

Robert A. Newlander ’70OR enjoying retirement in Georgetown, TX, where he is participates in church activities, tennis, golf, and community gatherings. He also transports children to Shriners’ hospitals in Houston and Galveston. Newlander and his wife, Ruth, keep busy with their large family, which includes 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

CL ASS NOTES

Herman S. “Woody” Dorsey, Jr. ’71ME serves as chairman of the Board of Ap-peals for Building Codes and as vice chairman on the Senior Citizens Adviso-ry Board for the City of Hampton, VA. He is writing an article on the need for an integrated, comprehensive energy strate-gy for the United States.

Sheldon Messing ’72CH retired from the Dow Chemical Company after spending 36 years in research and development and new business development.

Khawaja Daud Masud ’74CE believes he has been has blessed with a happy, con-tent, healthy life with a good life part-ner, his wife, Rubina. His sons, Saud and Omer, are bankers on Wall Street. He re-ceives great joy from his precious grand-children, Ryaan Saud (Ranoo), Minal Omer (Mino) and Anaya Omer (Anoo). Masud lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and owns a small construction company with his younger brother Kh Saad Masud.

Santosh C. Verma ’74CE works as an en-gineer for Caltrans. Prior to his current position, he served with distinction as chief engineer in the Department of Veter-ans Affairs. He authored a book on world peace, entitled How to Achieve Worldwide Prosperity and Peace. He is the recipient of several awards and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He hopes to establish a world peace foundation.

Joseph Frank ’75EE will celebrate the 60th anniversary of receiving his BS in Electrical Engineering from CCNY.

Steven M. Freedman ’77CM first literary novel, Dinah Blu, was published by Pub-lish America.

Sebastian A. Pierini ’77AE is a project engineer at Boeing Commercial Air-

plane’s Product Development Depart-ment on new and derivative airplane pro-grams. He is also an adjunct instructor at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide on the Seattle Campus.

Robert Prieto ’77NE In March, Prieto be-came member of The National Academy of Construction (NAC). His NAC election citation noted his “distinguished career as a leader, innovator, published author, and engineer.” He has contributed broadly and richly to the industry with over 375 publications and speeches. Since 2004, he has served as a senior vice president of the Fluor Corporation, a publicly owned engi-neering, procurement, construction, and maintenance services organization.

He has been active in various profes-sional organizations and universities, including membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers, where he serves as a member of its Industry Lead-ers Council; the National Infrastructure Advisory Council Critical Infrastructure Study Group, as a subject matter expert for engineering/construction; the NRC Critical Infrastructure Task Force; and as presidential appointee to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Advi-sory Council (ABAC).

Joseph M. Gilroy ’78CE recently joined the staff of Gonzalez Companies in St. Louis, MO.

Frank Robertazzi ’80EE is an assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management Group.

Debra Freedman ’81MG published a book, Let’s Communicate: Communica-tion Skills for the 21st Century, for students studying English as a second language. She also published a children’s book, The City Dog Meets the Country Dog.

Loren J. Abdulezer ’82MA authored various technology-related books in-cluding: Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard Best Practices, published by Business Objects Press of Pearson Education, Inc.; Excel Best Practices for Business, published by Wiley Publishing, Inc.; and Escape from Excel Hell, published by Wiley Publish-ing, Inc.

Peter Barker-Homek ’83TCS (formerly HUSS) received a commendation from Amnesty International for his work to end violence against women and girls.

Loucas Christodoulides ’83AE ’83EE works for Woodward as director of pro-gram management for the Guided Weap-ons Group in Santa Clarita, California.

Judith Levine-Hannemann ’84ME says her nursing background served her well during the recent job crisis. She works for a major insurer and plans to retire next year. Judith has been a widow for about 11 years and would like to hear from the pro-fessors and classmates of the ’84 “batch.”

Robert Faulhaber ’85EE is currently the chief architect for Lockheed Martin on the Antarctic Support Contract.

James K. Hanratty ’93MG works with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, assigned to the CAT/ DEL Ultraviolet Light Disinfection Facili-ty in Valhalla, NY. His children, Jessica and Matthew, students at Yorktown High School, are active in sports and commu-nity service. Jim and his fiancé, Mary, are looking forward to a wonderful fu-ture together with Jessica, Matthew, and Mary’s college-aged children, Nicholas and Christofer.

Ronald Yu ’04 EE is a Cisco network en-gineer at IPsoft.


CL ASS NOTES

CABLE | Fall 2012 47

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

Polytechnic Institute Alumni Association Seeking Nominations for International Board of Directors (5 seats) for the term 2013-2016

Polytechnic Institute Alumni Association Seeking Nominations for the following offices:

President, Executive Vice President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary for the term 2013-2015.

Potential nominees should have demonstrated service and leadership, and display a strong understanding and commitment to the mission of the Alumni Association and the advancement of NYU-Poly.

Nomination deadline for the 2013 election is December 21, 2012. Make nominations in writing to [email protected] or by mail to the Office of Alumni Relations, 15 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201.

Learn more about the PIAA by visiting www.poly.edu/alumni or

www.poly.edu/PIAA


CL ASS NOTES

Major Codes

AE Aerospace Engineering

CE Civil Engineering

CH Chemical Engineering

CM Chemistry

EE Electrical Engineering

IE Industrial Engineering

MA Mathematics

ME Mechanical Engineering

MG Management

MT Metallurgical Engineering

NE Nuclear Engineering

OR Operations Research

TCS Technology, Culture and Society

Do we have your current contact info?Update your e-mail address at www.poly.edu/email…Don’t miss out on exciting news and invitations to alumni events!

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