October 30, 2018

September Colloquia Round-up!

Dr. Shireen Kanakri: Department of Construction Management & of Interior Design Research Lecture

SPA Colloquium: September 14, 2018 at 3 pm in Bracken Library 104 
Dr. Shireen Kanakri

Dr. Shireen Kanakri is an assistant Professor and the Director of the Health and Environmental Design Research Lab (HEDR) within the College of Architecture and Planning at Ball State University.

The HEDR lab focuses on testing and studying the effects of environmental factors, such as sound, light and color, on children with autism.

The lab is made up of an acoustical room, a test room, and a waiting area.

During the observations, the children get to do their favorite activities, with the exception of electronics. They are allowed to do what they enjoy to avoid creating extra stress do to unfamiliar activities, which would then alter the children's reactions. This helps to keep negative reactions specifically linked to the environmental factors.

When the children are tested their blood pressure and heart rate, as well as the light, sound and color are all measured. 

Faculty and staff listen to Dr. Kanakri
Dr. Kanakri has published her work from the lab, which has lead to HEDR and Ball State being contacted by outside organizations from as far as California asking for help in designing their facilities with considerations for children with autism.

Upcoming studies for the HEDR lab includes determining how textures in the environment effect autistic children, and measuring results from the brain in addition to blood pressure and heart rate.

For more information about the HEDR lab please contact Dr. Kanakri at smkanakri@bsu.edu or call 765-285-1470.



Dr. Shaoen Wu: Digital Scholarship Lab Collaboration

SPA Colloquium: September 19, 2018 at noon in the Schwartz Complex
Dr. Shaoen Wu

Dr. Shaoen Wu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Ball State University.

This colloquium was hosted in partnership with the Ball State University Digital Scholarship Lab as well as the Computer Science Department.

The lecture provided lunch and was held on two different days to accommodate different course schedules. One presentation was on Wednesday, September 19th at noon and the second was Thursday, September 20th, also at noon.

Dr. Wu discussed his research with Ball State’s new computation capacity, and how faculty from a wide range of disciplines on campus could use this new system. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation, and provides the infrastructure necessary to conduct research on big data.

Co-Director of the DSL: James Connolly
Examples of the abilities of the new computation capacity include being used for large-scale data/text analysis, bioinformatics/cheminformatics, numerical computing, machine learning and deep learning voice recognition research, language translation and accelerated graphics rendering for 3D modeling.

This type of system has been used successfully for voice recognition in Google's machine translation, the Alpha Go game where the machine won the game over humans, and in space exploration where a new planet has been discovered by a machine through deep learning.
Faculty listens to Dr. Wu,
while enjoying lunch

The new infrastructure here at Ball State has 500 terabytes of storage, and only two computation nodes. This system has a lot of power, but does not take up much space. Ball State is the only institution in Indiana to have this new, powerful system.

Dr. Wu stated that, "having this computation capacity will allow for more interdisciplinary research here on campus and across the globe."

If you have any questions regarding how this new system could help your research please contact Dr. Shaoen Wu at swu@bsu.edu.