_{Eclectics I (Open to the Public)}  

Human Centered Design Initiatives

September 7

Speaker: Jin Woo Lee, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering & Computer Science

Human centered design is an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving that focuses on engaging with stakeholders to develop an in-depth understanding of the context, identifying their needs by collecting and incorporating social factors and delivering context-relevant solutions. The presentation will describe the Human Centered Design Initiative that aims to empower engineering students at CSUF with the ability to design solutions for social problems in Orange County that can improve the quality of life for individuals.

Printed Flexible Electronics: Applications and Future

September 21

Speaker: Ankita Mohapatra, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Computer
Engineering Program

In the last several years, there have been several interesting advances in the field of printed electronics. The technique is generally cheaper, quicker and does not need complicated methods like etching or lithography like in ordinary circuit fabrication procedures. It can also print with a variety of inks, on several different substrates like paper and polymer. In her research, Dr Mohapatra has worked with inks like silver nanoparticles, polypyrrole and PVP to design structures for controllable and stimulated antibiotic delivery from drug substrates. She has also printed and characterized circuit components like resistors, capacitors and tuning coils, and successfully tested printed humidity and ECG sensors which can be easily integrated into wearable devices.

Social Science in an Age of War: Yale’s 1932-33 International Seminar on Culture and Personality and its Worldwide Impact

October 5

Speaker: Leila Zenderland, Ph.D., Professor of American Studies

This talk will explore a unique educational experiment that took place during the 1932-33 school year. Called the “Seminar on the Impact of Culture on Personality,” it brought 13 young social scientists, each representing a different foreign culture, to Yale University, where together they studied how their own national cultures had shaped individual personalities. Included were German, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, French, Italian and other participants—many of whom had been scarred by the First World War. When this seminar ended, nearly all returned home, where they hoped to employ the insights they had gained from their year in the U.S. Within a decade, however, these former classmates instead found themselves using this knowledge in very different ways—as they fought on different sides of the Second World War. This talk will describe the work of this unusual international social science experiment of the 1930s and its consequences when the world once again went to war.

Rare Southern California Artifacts—Cogged Stones

October 19

Speaker: Valbone Memeti, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Geological Sciences

Dr. Memeti will be presenting a recently published study of native artifacts called cogged stones, which she conducted with two undergraduate students at CSUF in collaboration with colleagues at the Cooper Center in Orange County. The goal of this study was to gain more insight into the uses of these artifacts found only in Southern California. The team geologically analyzed several cogged stone fragments as well as rocks of the same type collected all over Southern California to determine where the rock materials used to carve the stones were collected. The geologists concluded that the source materials originated from nearby locations, which suggests that the source rock location was likely not an important aspect in the making of the cogged stones and thus likely also not important for their meaning or use.

The Art of Happiness

November 2

Speaker: Jessica Kamrath, Ph.D., Assistant Professor | Department of Human Communication Studies

Dr. Kamrath will discuss the ways in which happiness is created intentionally through language and action. She argues that if we can define happiness for ourselves then we can intentionally create it in our lives. This requires a shift in mindset and being open to questioning beliefs taken for granted and assumptions about happiness, in order to become aware of how our default ways of being constrain us and how language shapes our reality. Happiness takes work and intentionality. Happiness is not a destination to be reached or something tangible that you can grab hold of and then you are just “happy.” Many of us subscribe to dominant discourses about happiness, success, relationships and more, which actually constrain our awareness and ability to intentionally create happiness and flourish in our own lives and in the related areas. Additionally, she will discuss explicit connections to the ways in which communication impacts our ability (or not) to intentionally create happiness in our own lives. The goal is for people to begin to alter their frames of reference about flourishing to something that is a continuous process, fluid and created in language through intentional behaviors and communicative acts.

3D Integration and Hardware Security: Friends or Foes?

November 16

Speaker: Jaya Dofe, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering Program

Three-dimensional (3D) integration is an emerging technology to ensure the growth in transistor density and performance expected for future integrated circuits (ICs). 3D integration has attracted a significant amount of attention during the past two decades to develop diverse computing platforms such as high-performance processors’ computation density instead of increasing the transistor density of two-dimensional (2D) chips. Even though 3D integration paves a new path to reduce package size and power consumption while significantly improving bandwidth and improving computation density, a 3D approach is a double-edged sword: It introduces unique and unexplored challenges in managing 3D IC security. This talk will focus on novel opportunities offered by 3D integration for security mechanisms and discuss potential security vulnerabilities in 3D ICs.