June 28, 2021
An illustration of the optical fiber Kerr resonator, which Will Renninger’s lab in optics used with a spectral filter to create highly chirped laser pulses. (See Research News below.) The rainbow pattern in the foreground shows how the colors of a chirped laser pulse are separated in time. (University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw)
Dear members of the Hajim School community,
I am happy to announce a new way to engage with our Hajim community. Join me on the Meliora Collective on our new group page – the Hajim Community Network – to share, ask, learn, and connect about all things Hajim. This group will support and promote connections and discussion among alumni, current students, faculty, staff, parents, and friends, all while encouraging critical thinking, creativity, ethics, and leadership. See you there!
PRESTIGIOUS PROFESSORSHIPS
Congratulations to two of our faculty members who have received distinguished professorships from the University.
- Thomas Brown, professor of optics, is a recipient of the Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professorship. These prestigious awards, established in 1979, are presented every three years and are held by the recipients until the next round of awards. Tom is certainly a worthy recipient. He was the founding director of the Hopkins Center for Optical Design and Engineering, and he led The Institute of Optics undergraduate curriculum committee for more than a decade. Several of the courses he developed remain a cornerstone of the Institute’s curriculum. A revamped introductory course he developed “inspires those in the major already and opens the door to an exciting field of study for those not yet decided,” says Institute director Scott Carney, and it has contributed to a recent resurgence in undergraduate enrollment. And when COVID-19 forced our University to switch to remote learning last year, Tom continued to shine, organizing a series of virtual summer workshops in lieu of traditional in-person orientation to help incoming optics students feel at home. As a result, Tom is “responsible for many of the hallmarks of a modern Institute education,” Scott says. “He is a fearless teacher who relishes new courses and new challenges.” Read more.
- Chenliang Xu, assistant professor of computer science, has received a James P. Wilmot Distinguished Assistant Professorship. Recipients, representing “some of the most promising young men and women in the early stages of their academic careers,” are announced every two years and hold their professorships until the next round of awards. Chenliang, who joined the Department of Computer Science in 2016, is considered a rising star in the field of computer vision, in particular the extraction of meaning from recorded videos. A prolific researcher, with more than 60 peer-reviewed publications, Chenliang is also an innovative instructor who has revamped a computer vision course and introduced a popular course on deep learning. In 2020 alone, he published 18 papers, organized tutorials at two major conferences, served on five different program committees, and reviewed papers for five professional journals. “He is, already, a major contributor to our international reputation,” says Michael Scott, the Arthur Gould Yates Professor and Chair of Computer Science.
Well done, Tom and Chenliang!
RESEARCH NEWS
In a paper in Optica, William Renninger’s lab reports another exciting advance, describing the first demonstration of highly chirped pulses created by a using a spectral filter in a Kerr resonator—a type of simple optical cavity that operates without amplification. These cavities have stirred wide interest among researchers because they can support “a wealth of complicated behaviors including useful broadband bursts of light,” says Will, an assistant professor of optics. With the new approach, “we’re showing chirped pulses that remain stable even with more than 90 percent energy loss, which really challenges the conventional wisdom.”
The new technique works even with relatively low-quality, inexpensive equipment. This could pave the way for better high-capacity telecommunication systems, improved astrophysical calibrations used to find exoplanets, even more accurate atomic clocks, and precise devices for measuring chemical contaminants in the atmosphere. The new work is related to the approach used by Nobel Laureates Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD) and Gerard Mourou, who helped usher in a revolution in the use of laser technology when they pioneered chirped pulse amplification while doing research at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
Congratulations to Will, and to the other contributors to this paper: lead author Christopher Spiess, Qian Yang, and Xue Dong, all graduate research associates in Will’s lab, and Victor Bucklew, a former postdoctoral associate in the lab. Read more.
OUTSTANDING DISSERTATION
“When we talk about music, we tend to view it as an art of sound. However, it is much broader than that. We watch music performances, read musical scores, and memorize lyrics of songs. The visual aspect of musical performances helps express the ideas of performers and engage the audience, while the symbolic aspect of music connects composers with performers across continents and centuries. A successful intelligent system for music analysis should model all these modalities and their relations.”
This was the task Bochen Li, a recent PhD graduate from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, set out for himself in his thesis, Multi-modal analysis for music performance, which just received an AS&E 2020-2021 Outstanding Dissertation Award. The awards are based on a dissertation’s technical or creative strength, presentation, publication results (13 papers in Bochen’s case), and impact of publications.
Bochen, who was supervised by Zhiyao Duan, is now a research scientist with Bytedance. Well done, Bochen!
BEST PAPER AWARD
Congratulations to lead author Songyang Zhang, PhD student in computer science, and his advisor, Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science, for winning Best Long Paper award at the virtual 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This is among the top three conferences on natural language processing. Their paper, Video-aided Unsupervised Grammar Induction, is a collaboration with four researchers at Tencent AI Lab. It was selected from a pool of 1,797 total submissions to the conference.
REMINDERS
The deadline to apply for funded fellowships in the University’s PhD Training Program on Virtual and Augmented Reality is this Thursday, July 1. This is a great opportunity for first and second-year doctoral students who desire AR/VR cross-training experiences to pair with their existing studies. The deadline to apply for the general trainee program is August 15. Applications can be found here. Questions? Contact Kathleen DeFazio, program coordinator.
Thursday is also the deadline for undergraduates to apply online for a new virtual summer workshop program in the science of extreme pressure and high energy density physics, offered through the Center for Matter at Atomic Pressures. Top applicants will earn a stipend upon successful completion of the program. There is no fee to apply or attend. Questions? Contact Natalie Antal, CMAP program administrator.
Have a great week and enjoy a safe and restful July 4 weekend! The next issue of Hajim Highlights will be Tuesday, July 6.
Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman
