GIFT HONORS MOTWANI
The first of 10 new endowed chairs approved for the department of computer science was established as the Motwani Professorship in Computer Science, honoring the late Rajeev Motwani and bolstered by a $2.5 million gift from Google.
Motwani, a computer science professor who helped advise Google co-founders Sergey Brin, MS '95, and Larry Page, MS '98, drowned in June in a swimming pool accident. Motwani had been at Stanford since 1989.
Computer science departments at other top-ranked universities have more faculty members. Stanford is expanding in order to keep up with growing interest from students, remain closely engaged with entrepreneurial developments throughout Silicon Valley and collaborate broadly with other departments at the University. The School of Engineering is contributing $1.5 million to the Motwani Professorship.
STANFORD HELPS CREATE ONLINE RESEARCH MAGAZINE
Stanford, Duke and the University of Rochester have led a higher-ed consortium in creating Futurity, a website covering university research news that focuses on science, health and medicine, the environment, and society and culture.
Co-founder Lisa Lapin, assistant vice president for communications at Stanford, pointed out the site's "direct link to the research pipeline," allowing visitors to access published research and supplemental materials, as well as sign up for a daily email digest.
The site is ad-free and discussions are under way about the possible distribution of Futurity articles through other online news sites.
PARTNERSHIP STUDIES CARBON DIOXIDE STORAGE
Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) is awarding nearly $2 million to a research collaboration to develop safe, long-term storage for carbon dioxide. The work, which brings together expertise from Stanford, the University of Southern California, Peking University and China University of Geosciences at Wuhan, will explore the sequestration of carbon dioxide in China in underground reservoirs of salt water.
If successful, the research "could advance technologies for providing reliable electricity supplies while reducing global carbon emissions," said Sally Benson, director of GCEP.
MINIATURE PLANE BREAKS RECORD
A team of Stanford aeronautics and astronautics students and recent graduates showed off the right stuff in September, launching a one-pound, battery-powered autonomous propeller plane that reached an estimated altitude of 7,142 feet. That will be a new record after international certification for a plane flown in that weight class without remote control, using electronics and software to fly itself.
The flight was the most successful of four attempts at a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base and was the culmination of a class project spanning design theory to the construction of working models. Micro planes' potential uses include traffic monitoring, fire observation and environmental research.
SELF-RIGHTING BUILDINGS TESTED
Stanford researchers, led by civil and engineering professor Greg Deierlien and working in partnership with the University of Illinois, have designed an earthquake-resistant structural system for buildings that proved successful against large simulated quakes during a test in Japan.
The design, which can be part of initial construction or seismic retrofitting, features rocking frameworks with elastic, high-strength steel cables that rebound after being shaken and return dislodged buildings to their original alignment.
Buildings that withstand quakes often have to be torn down because they are beyond repair. The new design would protect people by minimizing damage and create economic and environmental benefits from the survival of the buildings.
LOCAL TALENT
What more fitting source of exhibition material for the Cantor Arts Center than Stanford's own faculty artists? They represent a gamut of genres, and a number of them enjoy international acclaim. Continuing until January 3, From Their Studios, a showcase of 13 current faculty members' studio art, is on display at Cantor's Pigott Family and Lynn Krywick Gibbons galleries. Specialties include painting, drawing, printmaking, kinetic/interactive sculpture, installation, photography, design, experimental media and documentary film, among others. For details and a schedule of public lectures by the artists, visit their website.
