IRMACS: The Interdisciplinary Colloquium
The spring 2013 session of the IRMACS Interdisciplinary Colloquium Series is dedicated to the recent recipients of the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplements (DAS) Program. The Program provides substantial and timely resources to a small group of researchers whose research proposals suggest and explore high-risk, novel or potentially transformative concepts and lines of inquiry, and are likely to have impact by contributing to groundbreaking advances in the area. In particular, for the purposes of the DAS Program, a superior research program is one that is highly rated for originality and innovation. The timeliness of DAS support represents the potential for the researcher at this time to capitalize on an opportunity, such as a recent research breakthrough, a paradigm shift or a new strategy to tackle a scientific problem or research question.
The table below lists the upcoming Interdisciplinary Colloquium Series presentations at the IRMACS Centre. You can get a list of these seminars with their abstracts by clicking on the title of the talk of interest or by going to the IRMACS Interdisciplinary Colloquium Series Abstracts page.
You can also view the extensive list of past IRMACS Interdisciplinary Colloquiums and past IRMACS Colloquiums the IRMACS Centre has hosted.
Past Presentations
Friday, March 15, 2013
Friday, March 1, 2013
In 1676, the Royal Society questioned the credibility of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek when he reported single-celled organisms swimming about in a drop of pond water. Among these unthinkable creatures were flagellated green algal cells much like my research organism, Chlamydomonas. In this seminar I will tell the serendipitous story of how chasing a curious flagellar behaviour lead to surprising discoveries about polycystic kidney disease and eukaryotic cell division.
Friday, February 1, 2013
The rational increase of structural dimensionality is an important synthetic goal in supramolecular systems. The Leznoff group has been incorporating paramagnetic and diamagnetic metals and non-octahedral cyanometallates into polymers, targeting magnetic, vapochromic, birefringent, luminescent, high dielectric, negative-thermal expansion and other properties. In particular, neglected linear d10 [M(CN)2]- building blocks (M=Au,Ag) have been targeted to take advantage of attractive metallophilic interactions to increase structural dimensionality. Several property-based vignettes from this work will be presented in this lecture. For example...
Friday, January 18, 2013
In recent years, mobile devices have become powerful in terms of computing power, memory, screen size, and screen quality. This provides an improved experience for viewing multimedia content and has resulted in substantial demand for mobile multimedia services. However, providing high-quality multimedia services to numerous mobile users faces many challenges, including scarce and variable wireless bandwidth and limited battery lifetime of mobile devices. In this talk, I will describe the main research problems in mobile multimedia and the approaches that we are taking in the Network Systems Lab at SFU to address these research problems....
