University News

Dean Sacked for Chip Research Fraud

Representatives of Shanghai Jiaotong University announced May 12 that the Hanxin computer chip series are fake and the state-funded chip research is fraudulent, and a leading scientist has been sacked.

According to a government-organized investigation, Chen Jin, who was heading a team in the research, committed fraudulence in developing the Hanxin chips for digital signal processing.

Chen, who was dean of the Micro-electronics School of Shanghai Jiaotong University, was found cheating technological appraisal teams from the government, the university, Shanghai municipal government and relative ministries which put public funds in his research project.

Shanghai Jiaotong University has announced to remove Chen from his post as the dean and his professorship.

The title of the Changjiang Scholar and the remunerations for Chen was recalled by the Ministry of Education.

Because of tense intellectual property issues with the rest of the world, the Chinese government has made the development of its own high-tech and semiconductor industries a major priority. In March 2003, the government held a press conference in Shanghai to announce a major breakthrough, the development of the Hanxin, or China chip, a high-speed processor for mobile phones and other electronic devices that would help end the foreign monopoly on computer chip design and allow China to begin producing its own patented semiconductor equipment.

Nine months later, the Ministry of Science and Technology held another press conference hailing the development of two faster chips from Mr. Chen's labs, Hanxin 2 and Hanxin 3. Now, the government and Jiaotong say, none of the chips had the capabilities Chen claimed, even though the government had earlier said that the chips had been tested by government appraisal teams.

The national government has now canceled the Hanxin project and recalled its funds, Jiaotong University said in its Friday press statement.

Suggestions that Mr. Chen and his team had faked their findings were first posted on the Internet last December or January by someone claiming to be a whistle-blower.

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Hughes Hall Elects New President

The diplomat Sarah Squire has been elected the new President of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, taking effect on October 1, 2006.

Mrs Squire served as HM Ambassador to Tallinn at the time Estonia was preparing to join the European Union and NATO in 2000–3, and is currently group director in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's London-based service organisation, FCO Services. Primarily a specialist in Central Europe, she has also held diplomatic posts in Tel Aviv, Senegal and Washington DC.

Hughes Hall is Cambridge's oldest graduate college. It has over 500 students, half of them from overseas and a third studying for PhDs, and a strong sporting tradition, especially in rugby. The president is elected by the college's 45 fellows.

A longtime resident of Cambridge, Mrs Squire is a graduate of Newnham College, where she read History. The current president of Hughes Hall, Professor Peter Richards, formally Dean of St Mary's Medical School and director of Northwick Park, joined the college in 1998. During his presidency Hughes Hall has erected a new £9m (US$16.9 million) residential building overlooking the university cricket ground that contains 80 student rooms and a new dining hall, kitchens and combination room.

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Michael & Susan Dell Foundation Grants $50 Million to University of Texas

Representatives of The University of Texas announced a US$50 million gift from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation to put Austin at the leading edge of pediatric health research, computer science and the advancement of healthy living in childhood development.

This gift from the Dell family foundation will enable three new, world-class facilities at UT Austin:

• A pediatric health research institute, which will complement the new Dell Children's Medical Center nearby, to establish a hub in Austin for leading children's health and biomedical research. The facility will be named the Dell Pediatric Research Institute.
• A new computer science building on the UT Austin campus to support UT's quest to become the top-ranked public computer science department in the country and enable breakthroughs driven by advances in computer science that will have broad application across a number of industries and sciences. The new building on the Austin campus will be named the Dell Computer Science Hall.
• A center for the advancement of healthy living to address critical health problems that impact healthy childhood development, including a particular focus on combating childhood obesity. The new facility will be named the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Advancement of Healthy Living.

Dell Pediatric Research Institute

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation awarded a matching grant over three years to help UT establish a pediatric health research institute in Austin on the former Robert Mueller Airport site, adjacent to the new Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas. Combining UT Austin's core expertise in life sciences with the new Dell Children's Medical Center will establish Austin as a center of excellence for children's health and biomedical research. The Dell family foundation gift will provide a 1:1 match for every dollar collected through private funding. The new facility is scheduled to open in 2009.

Dell Computer Science Hall

The funding from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation is part of UT Austin's effort to advance the computer science department to the top ranking of public institutions in the nation. The foundation's funding will go toward the cost of a new building, a facility that will enable advances in computing power and its broad applications to improve the future of biological, physical and other scientific fields. This matching grant complements the Dell family foundation's earlier investment in the Texas Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (TSTEM) Initiative, a public-private partnership with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the Texas Education Agency, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Communities Foundation of Texas to better prepare Texas high school students in STEM subjects and prepare them for future careers in those fields.

Michael & Susan Dell Center for Advancement of Healthy Living

This grant has been awarded to the UT Health Science Center at Houston's School of Public Health to establish a public health research, education and service program in Austin. This world-class center will conduct research to better understand and influence behaviors and environmental conditions that affect healthy living. Initial research will focus on childhood obesity prevention to address the epidemic of childhood obesity and its effect on related chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes. The new center will bring together existing work from the school's Human Nutrition Center, including its successful and widely recognized programs: CATCH (Coordinated Approach to Child Health), a K-5 school and family-based program designed to improve healthy eating and increase physical activity; and IMPACT (Incorporating More Physical Activity and Calcium in Teens), a program designed for girls to improve bone health and weight-bearing physical activity. Susan Dell's personal commitment to healthy living and ensuring children learn life-long, healthy habits – in addition to her recent naming to the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports – has made combating childhood obesity a key priority for the Dell family foundation.

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UTD's Center for BrainHealth Receives $1 Million Gift

The Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), a facility dedicated to cutting-edge research in the brain sciences, has received a $1 million donation from Irving, Texas, businessman Dennis Berman and his wife Claudia to establish the Berman Laboratory for Learning and Memory.

Primary research initiatives of the laboratory will include understanding how learning occurs, understanding how information is retained and deciphering how knowledge and memories are maintained throughout an individual's lifetime. Researchers also will study how long-term information storage and memory maintenance is affected by aging.

In addition, the gift will fund the Berman Scholars Program, which will support young investigators through post-doctoral training in memory research, as well as the Berman Lecture Series, which will host a national or international expert each year to give a public talk about memory-related issues.

Berman's interests, paired with a natural talent for business, led him to great success founding several companies, most recently the learning-management firm Trivac, which markets a new learning tool that Berman created, the LIT Learning Program. The program promises "far superior" retention of information than traditional training methods.

Berman is the founder and chairman of Trivac. He comes from an extensive background of training and learning practices. He founded several companies, including Mirex Corporation and Denitech Corporation. He also was one of two largest shareholders of Voyager Expanded Learning, a company that created new methods for teaching students. Berman has trained executives for more than 35 years in his own companies and via other businesses. He has participated in numerous nonprofit boards, including Just for the Kids, Dallas' Winston School and Dallas public broadcasting station KERA. He also has served on the Governor's Business Council and on that group's executive committee, under then-Texas Governor George W. Bush.

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Nanobiotechnology Team Aims Small but Thinks Big

The Johns Hopkins University is preparing to aim enormous research and educational resources at some exceedingly small targets.

Drawing on the expertise of more than 75 faculty members from such diverse disciplines as engineering, biology, medicine and public health, the university today officially launched its ambitious new Institute for NanoBioTechnology.

The institute will strive for major advances in medicine by developing new diagnostic tools and treatments based on interdisciplinary research conducted at the atomic or molecular level. The institute will encourage the movement of these campus breakthroughs into the private sector for further development and marketing. At the same time, institute members will train the next generation of scientists and engineers in this emerging field, offering both graduate-level instruction and a new undergraduate minor in nanobiotechnology.

The institute is being launched with US$6 million in funding and the participation of dozens of Johns Hopkins faculty members from the Whiting School of Engineering, the School of Medicine, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The institute will make use of existing laboratory space on the university's Homewood and medical campuses in Baltimore. Its startup funding has been provided by the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, NASA and various Johns Hopkins divisions. Additional financial support is being sought.

The institute s researchers will toil at the scientific frontier where nanotechnology, a field that is perhaps 15 years old, is applied to biology and medicine. This emerging research focus, nanobiotechnology, is barely a decade old. Johns Hopkins is the ideal setting for such a far-reaching effort, organizers say, because it is one of the few institutions in the world that can bring together world-class expertise in the many disciplines needed to study and test biological components smaller than a human cell and to fabricate materials and devices that can operate at this scale.

The scale is astonishingly small. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. By comparison, a single strand of human hair is roughly 50,000 to 80,000 nanometers wide. Some of the projects envisioned by institute researchers involve manipulation of a single molecule or a fragment of protein.

Institute members will work within four key research areas:

Diagnostics, including the development of molecular imaging probes that can relay information about the health of a patient's organs and other tissues without the need for a biopsy. Advances in this area promise to greatly enhance the way diseases are diagnosed and treated.

Therapeutics, including nanoscale forms of drug delivery, gene therapy, protein therapy and immunotherapy. These will be used to treat diseases such as cancer and asthma and conditions such as spinal cord injuries.

Cellular and molecular dynamics, including the use of powerful new tools to study the inner working of cells. This knowledge should help identify causes of disease and new molecular targets that could help cure medical disorders.

Health and environment, a research thrust that will use the new tools and techniques of nanobiotechnology in understanding the potential impact of nanotechnology on public health and the environment.

The institute's organizers say its greatest strength will be its ability to tackle complex medical problems by drawing on an array of Johns Hopkins experts with widely different skills. For example, a new therapy for cystic fibrosis might begin with tiny polymer particles developed by chemistry experts, carrying medications developed by biologists. These researchers may collaborate with fluid mechanics experts to find the most effective way to get these particles into the lungs. Surface scientists, toxicologists and other medical experts would assist in getting these particles through the lungs' mucus barrier and into the appropriate cells without endangering the patient.

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Prof. Yael Edan Appointed Deputy-Rector

Prof. Yael Edan was recently appointed to the position of Deputy-Rector for Ben-Gurion University. During the last six years Prof. Edan was Head of the Dept. of Industrial Engineering and Management.  She is replacing Prof. Shraga Segal, who passed away in February 2006.

Prof. Edan is a graduate from the Technion, with a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering and a M.Sc. in Agricultural Engineering. She completed her Ph.D. at Purdue University in the U.S.A. The topic of her thesis was "Control and Design of an Intelligent Agricultural Robot". She arrived at Ben-Gurion University in 1993 and joined the Dept. of Industrial Engineering and Management.

The areas of her research focus on robotics, sensors, simulation, computer integrated manufacturing, and intelligent automation in agriculture. She instructed and continues to guide many M.Sc. and Doctorate students, as well as being accredited for a number of patents and dozens of scientific publications in Israel and around the world.

During her term as Deputy-Rector, Prof. Edan intends to promote academic research and development.

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UCLA Engineers Announce Breakthrough in Semiconductor Research

Engineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are announcing a critical new breakthrough in semiconductor spin-wave research.

UCLA Engineering adjunct professor Mary Mehrnoosh Eshaghian-Wilner, researcher Alexander Khitun and professor Kang Wang have created three novel nanoscale computational architectures using a technology they pioneered called "spin-wave buses" as the mechanism for interconnection. The three nanoscale architectures are not only power efficient, but also possess a high degree of interconnectivity.

In contrast to traditional information processing technology devices that simply move electric charges around while ignoring the extra spin that tags along for the ride, spin-wave buses put the extra motion to work transferring data or power between computer components. Information is encoded directly into the phase of the spin waves. Unlike a point-to-point connection, a "bus" can logically connect several peripherals. The result is a reduction in power consumption, less heat and, ultimately, the ability to make components much smaller as no physical wires are actually used to send the data.

The idea of using spin waves for information transmission and processing was first developed under the name "spin-wave buses" by UCLA Engineering's Khitun, Wang and graduate researcher Roman Ostroumov.

The innovative work with spin-wave buses recently garnered the trio a prestigious 2006 Inventor Recognition Award from the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corp. The corporation funds and operates university-based research centers in microelectronics technology, seeking to expand cooperative, long-range applied microelectronics research at U.S. universities.

UCLA Engineering's team contends that the creation and detection of spin-wave packets in nanostructures can be used efficiently to perform massively parallel computational operations, allowing for the design of the first practical, fully interconnected network of processors on a single chip. This breaks with currently proposed spintronic architectures, which rely on a charge transfer simultaneously with spin for information exchange and show significant interconnect problems.

Eshaghian-Wilner, in conjunction with Khitun and Wang, has developed three innovative, spin-wave bus-based designs that use spin waves to achieve the low-power device performance and improved scalability highly desired by industry chip manufacturers.

The first device developed by UCLA engineers, described in a paper presented publicly at the annual ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, being held in Ischia, Italy, during the first week of May, is a reconfigurable mesh interconnected with spin-wave buses. The architecture of the device requires the same number of switches and buses as standard reconfigurable meshes, but is capable of simultaneously transmitting multiple waves using different frequencies on each of the spin-wave buses — making the parallel architecture capable of very fast and fault-tolerant algorithms. Unlike the traditional spin-based nanostructures that also transmit charge, with this design only waves are transmitted, keeping power consumption extremely low.

The second architecture invention, details of which will be published at the Nano Science and Technology Institute 9th Annual Nanotechnology Conference and Trade Show — or Nanotech 2006 — being held in Boston during the second week of May, is a fully connected cluster of functional units with spin-wave buses. Each node simultaneously broadcasts to all other nodes, and can receive and process multiple data concurrently. The novel design allows all nodes to intercommunicate in constant time. This invention overcomes traditional area restrictions found in current networks.

The researchers also have developed a spin-wave-based crossbar for fully interconnecting multiple inputs to multiple outputs, and plan to announce the full details of the design at the 2006 IEEE Conference on Nanotechnology to be held in Cincinnati, Ohio, this coming July. As compared to standard molecular crossbar designs, UCLA Engineering's is much more fault-tolerant — allowing alternate paths to be reconfigured in case of switch failure. By transmitting waves instead of traditional current charge transmission, the design architecture allows a large reduction in power consumption and provides a high level of interconnectivity between many more paths than currently possible.

Currently, various extensions and applications of these three designs are being studied and evaluated by the UCLA Engineering team and their students. Postgraduate researcher Shiva Navab is proposing a set of innovative techniques for mapping biologically inspired types of computations on these models for image processing and neural computations. Other application areas being investigated include bioinformatics and implantable biomedical devices. Heterogeneous integrations of these designs in a complementary fashion with other molecular and nanotechnologies also are being developed.

The architectural methods are undergoing implementation and further testing at the UCLA Device Research Laboratories by research scientists Joon Young Lee, who specializes in spin wave-based device processing, and Ming Bao, who carries out the time-resolved inductive voltage measurements aimed at detecting spin waves propagating in 100-nanometer-thick ferromagnetic films. The Device Research Laboratories nano facilities are led by Wang, director of the Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics Focus Center and the newly developed Western Institute of Nanotechnology, all headquartered at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

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Ploegh Wins Belgian Health Prize

Princess Mathilde of Belgium presented Hidde Ploegh, MIT biology professor and member of the Whitehead Institute, with the 2006 Interbrew-Baillet Latour Health Prize on Saturday, May 6.

The prize, worth 150,000 euros (about US$192,000), is the largest scientific prize awarded in Belgium. Sponsored by the InBev-Baillet Latour Fund, the award is given annually to one or two scientists "to recognize the merits of a person whose work has contributed prominently to the improvement of human health."

According to a statement released by the foundation, Ploegh "has made fundamental discoveries on how abnormal proteins are broken down in cells and how viruses manipulate these processes to gain advantage. His work has changed our understanding of how normal cells eliminate newly made proteins that are incorrectly folded, and of how viruses evade immune responses."

One of the world's leading researchers in immune system behavior, Ploegh studies the various tactics that viruses employ to evade our immune responses, and the ways in which our immune system distinguishes friend from foe. His findings have implications for both vaccine and drug development.