What role do oil companies have in tackling climate change? In this program, Paasha Mahdavi, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara, talks about the challenge of getting big oil to take climate change seriously. Mahdavi's research broadly explores comparative environmental politics and the political consequences of natural resource wealth. He is the author of Power Grab: Political Survival Through Extractive Resource Nationalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020),...

How can we use raw materials to improve the environment? In this program, Susannah L. Scott, professor of chemistry at UC Santa Barbara, discusses how to efficiently use catalytic conversion of unconventional materials, such as biomass and synthetic polymers to create sustainable routes to renewable energy, fuels and chemicals. Series: "GRIT Talks" [Science] [Show ID: 39440]

Effective management of thermal-fluids transport has become a critical challenge in many energy, water, and electronic applications due to the increasing power density and shrinking length scales. In this talk, I will first describe our effort to manipulate multi-phase fluid motion using light-responsive surfactants. Upon illuminating droplets and bubbles with light, the surfactants at the fluid-fluid interfaces go through photo-isomerization, which changes the local interfacial tension and...

Modern slavery, which encompasses 45 million people around the world, is intricately linked to the economy, politics, violence and war, gender and the environment. In this panel discussion, Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, talks about the impact of contemporary slavery with three UC Berkeley professors, Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita, Department of Sociology, Enrique Lopezlira, Ph.D., director,...

There are 45 million enslaved people in the world today. The links between slavery, conflict, environmental destruction, economics and consumption began to strengthen and evolve in the 20th century. The availability of people who might be enslaved dramatically increased in line with population growth. According to Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, the large and negative environmental impact of modern slavery...

Lei Li is an assistant professor in Computer Science Department at University of California Santa Barbara. His research interest lies in natural language processing, machine translation, and AI-powered drug discovery. He received his B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 38476]

Rob Ober is Chief Platform Architect of NVIDIA’s data center products, and works with global Hyperscales to architect AI and Deep Learning clusters, develop systems and platform architecture, and influence NVIDIA hardware and software platform roadmaps. His background is in processor and system architecture, with experience in networking, storage, memories, and wireless. Rob has over 40 international patents in processor architecture, low power design, storage, networks, wireless, and mobile...

Katharine E. Schmidtke received a B.Sc. Degree in physics and mathematics from Keele University, UK, in 1989 and Ph.D in laser physics and non-linear optics from the University of Southampton in 1993. She went on to do post-doctoral research in epitaxial growth of non-linear optical materials at Stanford University, CA, USA. She has a 25-year career in the optical communications industry including roles at Finisar, JDS Uniphase and New Focus. For the past 7 years she has worked at Facebook,...

Yufei Ding joined the Department of Computer Science (with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering), University of California at Santa Barbara as an Assistant Professor in Nov 2017. Her research interests lie in the broad fields of domain-specific language design, architecture and compiler optimization, and hardware acceleration. Her current research focuses on building high-performance, energy-efficient, and high-fidelity programming frameworks for...

Martin Fischer is the Kumagai Professor of Engineering at Stanford University and directs the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering. He is known globally for his work and leadership in developing and applying digital methods to increase the productivity of construction project teams, enhance building performance, and create new strategic opportunities for firms in the construction industry. His award-winning research results have been used operationally and strategically by many...

Dan Nall is a professional engineer, a registered architect, an ASHRAE and an AIA Fellow, a LEED Fellow, an ASHRAE Certified Building Energy Modeling Professional, a certified High Performance Building Design Professional and a Certified Passive House Consultant. He is currently a member of the ASHRAE Task Force for Building Decarbonization, is Chair of ASHRAE Standards Project Committee 227P, the Passive Building Design Standard, and is a member of the Commercial Buildings Working Group of...

Cliff Young is a software engineer in Google Research, where he works on codesign for deep learning accelerators. He is one of the designers of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and one of the founders of the MLPerf benchmark. Previously, Cliff built special- purpose supercomputers for molecular dynamics at D. E. Shaw Research and was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. Cliff holds AB, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science from Harvard University. Cliff is a member of ACM and...

Mead Rusert is President of Automated Logic, a leading provider of innovative building automation and energy management solutions that maximize energy efficiency and ensure occupant comfort and engagement. With over 30 years of industry experience, he brings a broad background to the position including executive roles in engineering, product management, and marketing for commercial HVAC products at Carrier Corporation. He holds three patents related to temperature control algorithms. Mead...

Surendra Anubolu is a Distinguished Engineer at Broadcom in the Switch Group. He is currently working on benchmarking and enhancing performance of distributed AI work loads and telemetry for network applications. Since joining Broadcom in 2015, Surendra worked on the Tomahawk and Trident line of products. Prior to Broadcom, Surendra worked at Cisco as Director of Engineering responsible for delivering Ethernet switch silicon. Surendra Anubolu holds an MS from Indian Institute of Science,...

Bharath Muthiah is a Technical Lead in Meta’s Infrastructure team and leads technical sourcing for large scale AI HW cluster technologies and solutions. In this capacity, Bharath engages extensively with Meta’s strategic technology partners, industry consortiums, hyperscale peers, and academic partners in influencing customization and optimizations for Meta’s key AI use cases. Prior to this, Bharath led the technical sourcing and enabling efforts for Meta’s Compute and Video Infrastructure...

Ravi Agarwal is a technical sourcing manager at the Facebook Infrastructure group. In this role, he is responsible for driving advanced packaging architectures and foundry for both networking and AI/ML compute applications to meet Facebook future workloads. He is driving Chiplet Business Workstream in Open Domain-Specific Architecture (ODSA) Sub-Project within the Open Compute Project (OCP) working with ecosystem partners to enable Chiplet marketplace. Prior to Facebook, he spent 12+ years at...

UC Santa Barbara's Clint Schow discusses how to bring low-power O-band coherent optics to data centers. Schow received B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. After positions at IBM and Agility Communications, Dr. Schow spent more than a decade at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, as a Research Staff Member and Manager of the Optical Link and System Design group. He has led international R&D programs spanning chip-to-chip optical...

High Volume Silicon Photonics for Co-Packaged Optics and Optical I/O with Thomas Liljeberg of Intel. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 38466]

Manish Mehta is the VP of Marketing and Operations for the Optical Systems Division at Broadcom. Manish leads go-to- market and operational activity for the division responsible for developing and manufacturing devices and systems used in optical communications. Prior to joining Broadcom, Manish was EVP and Product Line Management of Source Photonics where he led the company's entry into the datacenter market. Manish holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from The University of California,...

Ram Huggahalli is a Principal Hardware Engineer in Microsoft's Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure group. His focus areas are hyper-scalar systems architecture, SoC/platform-level interconnects and accelerator architecture strategies for the next 2-4 years. Prior to Microsoft, Ram has been with Intel Corporation contributing to memory and I/O subsystem directions in various Xeon processors and platforms, large scale HPC interconnect product roadmaps and system level simulation...

Rob Stone is a member of the infrastructure team at Meta, focusing on next generation optics and networking. Prior to Facebook, Rob was a distinguished engineer at Broadcom within the switch architecture team. He is active in industry communities including IEEE and other MSAs. Rob holds a D.Phil. in Physics from The University of Oxford. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 38463]

John E. Bowers holds the UC Santa Barbara Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology and is the Director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Bowers received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University and worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories and Honeywell before joining UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Bowers is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, a fellow of...

Chris Cole is advising several companies including II-VI Inc. and Quintessent Inc., on advanced optical interfaces. Before, he was VP of Advanced Development, Finisar Corp. where he led the definition and development of 10 through 400 Gb/s optical interfaces for datacom and telecom applications. He delivered multiple generations of optical transceivers leading to ~$1billion of Finisar revenue. The 40G, 100G, 200G and 400G interfaces he defined and proposed for IEEE standardization constitute...

The ocean is a critical component of climate solutions. Not only does the ocean have the potential to provide food security, but it can provide critical minerals for the energy transition, species with biopharmaceutical and biotechnology potential, a source of income through sustainable tourism, and innovation of renewable power technologies. Samantha Murray, Executive Director of the Marine Biodiversity and Conservation program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Amanda Netburn,...