Richard Gonzalez - US grants

The current work studies the role of promoter materials with carbon monoxide-hydrogen reactions. This work will also be extended to include bimetallic clusters, support and dispersion effects. An infrared cell is used that permits simultaneous infrared and kinetic measurements; simultaneous infrared, temperature-programmed desorption; and temperature-programmed reaction studies, surface composition measurements from experimental extinction coefficients, and surface concentrations of catalytically active species under ;itin situ;ro conditions.

This award will support Professor Richard D. Gonzalez of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in collaboration with Professor Ricardo Gomez of the Metropolitan University of Mexico at Iztapalapa. Studies recently completed suggest that metal-precursor-support interactions are important in determining the resulting surface composition of supported multimetallic catalysts. In particular, the presence of a mobile surface metal-precursor results in the surface enrichment of that metal in the resulting bimetallic catalyst. The investigators aim to identify the structure of these precursor-surface complexes using diffuse U.V. reflectance spectroscopy. The strength of the metal-support interactions will be measured through the use of quantitative differential scanning calorimetry and the elemental composition of the resulting bimetallic particles will be obtained through the use of dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDXS). EDXS will also be used to study interparticle metal phase relationships. The proposed research will be carried out simultaneously at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Metropolitan University of Mexico at Iztapalapa. The in-situ diffuse U.V. reflectance studies, the microcalorimetric DSC studies and the catalyst charac- terization studies, including the surface composition measurements, will be carried out at the University of Illinois. The catalytic probe reactions and major portion of the EDXS studies will be performed in Mexico.

This Americas Program award will fund a cooperative research project, involving sol-gel processing and characterization of supported metal catalysts, between Dr. Richard D. Gonzalez of Tulane University and Professors Ricardo Gomez Romero and Tessy Lopez Goerne of the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Mexico at Iztapalapa. The focus of this proposed study will be on sol-gel processing of silica and alumina. A new series of high surface area catalysts in which the metal is in a highly dispersed state will be prepared. Sol-gel processing will lead to the formation of more homogenous-supported metal catalysts with a much more uniform distribution of particle sizes. The reforming catalysts prepared by sol-gel processing have the potential to compete favorably with industrial catalysts in use. This cooperative research project will share facilities available at Tulane University and Mexico. The synthetic procedures and catalyst characterization studies will be performed at Tulane while catalytic studies will be performed in Mexico.

This grant provides funding to conduct a series of workshops on Interdisciplinary Design as an Instructional Discipline to be held over a 12 month period. Workshops will be held at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and in conjunction with the 2009 NSF CMII Grantees Conference and the 2009 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences. These workshops will address issues related to supporting the emerging discipline of design through graduate education and interdisciplinary design research. Participants from a broad range of disciplines, including engineering, architecture, industrial design, visual arts, psychology, and business, among others, will be invited to attend.

Design is an integrative activity that spans many disciplines; however, our educational system often struggles to provide interdisciplinary design experiences for our undergraduate and graduate students and to recognize the significance of design research. Recently, new and innovative interdisciplinary graduate programs in design have arisen with strong ties to engineering yet structured to fully embrace and complement research from other disciplines. These graduate programs have the potential to influence the development of a new discipline of design that includes both education and research. Interdisciplinary education is a central factor in expanding and sustaining an American competitive advantage in today's global economy. Developing design as a broadly recognized and practiced instructional discipline is essential for maintaining leadership in the innovation of new products and systems. This series of workshops will bring together experts in the field of engineering design research and education and the larger design community to explore the challenges, successes, practices and future directions of interdisciplinary design graduate programs to gain insight into how to construct, grow, and sustain programs that prepare students for successful design innovation. If successful, this series of workshops will form the basis of new approaches to design education and research that fully embraces interdisciplinary collaborations within the current structure of academia.

Five research-productive faculty members from the biology and physics departments at the University of San Diego will purchase, install, maintain, and manage a shared laser scanning confocal microscope to advance research in the physiological, cellular, molecular, and biophysical sciences. Confocal microscopy is essential in providing sensitive, high resolution, three-dimensional, time-resolved imaging so as to characterize: ion transporter expression in aquatic animals (Patrick, Gonzalez), reactive oxygen species in plants (Baird), serotonergic neurons in worms (Loer), intracellular trafficking in cellular migration (Prigozhina) and the intramolecular dynamics of diffusing DNA molecules. Research by the PI and co-PIs is highly integrative and requires a breadth of confocal technology that will enable imaging and data acquisition over a wide range of magnification, ranging from individual macromolecules (DNA) and real-time imaging of events in live cells, to localizing molecules in whole mounts of tissues or intact organisms. The specifications of Olympus Fluo View 1000/IX81 inverted microscope will satisfy the confocal research and training requirements of the faculty and provide opportunities for new and collaborative projects.

The NSF award will be used to purchase a confocal microscope for five faculty members in the Biology and Physics departments at USD, three of which are women faculty, including one pre-tenure, junior faculty in Physics. USD is an undergraduate institution where 58% of students are women and 20% are underrepresented ethnicities. The PI and co-PIs have a strong record of productive, collaborative research with undergraduates throughout the year. Students from Mater Dei High School (80% Latino/a and 20% from economically disadvantaged backgrounds) and San Diego City College (57% women, 70% minority status) will also benefit from gaining skills in confocal technology in summer research with USD science faculty. Integration of confocal technology into our research-based curriculum will augment several biology and physics courses and provide an opportunity to develop an interdisciplinary microscopy techniques course for the new biophysics major. This state-of-the-art instrument will enrich the research and educational experience of students in STEM areas at USD and attract highly motivated undergraduates to science careers.

This research project will create a theoretical and computational infrastructure to design new technology using creativity from crowds and individuals in combination with machine learning. A crowd could be a collection of experts within an organization, a classroom of students, or a large number of people online. Earlier research used machine learning working with individual engineers to help with simple design problems. This research will extend the earlier work to more complex configuration design problems, and will add crowd sourcing. Design representations will be graphs instead of vectors, and the design space will not be defined ahead of time. Machine learning may prove to be an important improvement over design evolution methods, and will provide insight into which design features are important. Machine learning also generates a model of subjective human judgment and preference, leading to more efficient and perhaps more innovative design synthesis.

If successful, this research will provide a platform for new models of innovation with input from multiple stakeholders: A machine supported by crowd-sourced knowledge and real-time interaction with humans will be able to produce unique and creative structures that were beyond the imagination of the humans involved. This research will also result in algorithmic advances in inference, learning, and related optimization techniques in representation learning for structured data and interactive human-machine collaboration. It will also provide a mathematical framework for innovation in massive system design problems involving thousands of designers such as the design of a jet fighter. The technology developed will be possible to implement in a variety of environments from complex engineering system design decisions to ideas for new products on commercial sites. In an educational context, this research, if successful, will allow students and teachers to experiment with design tools, individually, as part of a classroom experience, or as a national endeavor to both learn and possibly to generate new design ideas collectively.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose a two-day workshop for Spring/Summer 2015 titled Operationalizing Affective Complexity: Measurement and Applications. Affective complexity, or the experience of more than one emotion at the same time, has been a topic of recent debate in multiple areas including subjective well-being, decision making, judgment, attitude ambivalence, socio-emotional and social cognitive development and aging, social neuroscience, and health. Examples include research on the co-occurrence of feelings, blends of same and different emotion valences, flexible and dynamic appraisals of emotions and feelings, asynchrony of behavioral reactions and subjective feelings, spillover of moods, and transitions from one emotion to another. Evidence suggests that mixed emotional states develops over childhood and may be enhanced in later life. The phenomenological experience of affective complexity extends our fundamental understanding of the meaning of emotions. It raises theoretical and empirical questions about the measurement and analysis of emotional states, experiences, and episodes that consist of more than one emotion. The resolution of these issues has implications for how we assess affective experience, a topic of increasing interest in NIA-supported international surveys related to the measurement of subjective well-being. Research about affective complexity is dispersed in multiple journals. The definitions and methods used in the various subdisciplines differ. This poses challenges for researchers in emerging fields, including research on experienced well-being, decision neuroscience, and neuroeconomics, where the measurement of emotional states and their relevance for policy analysis and decision-making requires accurate assessment of affective states in real time, appropriately linked to context. Recent advances in aging research, regarding the complexity and changes in affective experience over the life course, have not been fully integrated into this discussion. The goal of this meeting is to strengthen links between these disciplines and approaches. The workshop will engage a diverse audience of up to 100 participants from a range of fields, including psychology of aging, affective science, behavioral economics, psychiatry, and demography. The workshop will consist of short talks and discussion sessions. Each day will end in a panel-led discussion designed to integrate across talks and sessions and engage audience (live and web streaming). The meeting will establish a multidisciplinary network to share information, promote cross talk, and facilitate collaboration. Recruitment for the conference will include several society newsletters, email groups and list serves as well as contacts with existing networks involving Program Committee members and confirmed speakers. This will allow broad coverage and diversity of discipline, academic rank, and conference participants. Output from the conference will include downloadable videos of the talks, white papers, special issue of a journal, special topic symposia at relevant conferences, and infrastructure for continued collaboration after the workshop.

A central challenge in natural language processing is to develop methods for determining how meanings of words relate to one another. This task is called "lexical semantics", because "lexical" means "word" and "semantics" means "meaning". Traditional dictionaries do not solve the problem of lexical semantics, because definitions are often circular or incomplete, especially for the most common words. Instead, models of lexical semantics are computed by processing large bodies of text, using the principle that pairs of words that often appear in the same contexts must have meanings that are similar along some dimensions. For example, the words "man" and "boy" would be inferred to have similar meanings along the dimensions of "human" and "gender". However, a limitation of current models is that they assume that the meaning of words is the same for all speakers of a language. This is plainly false: we know, for example, that English speakers use words differently depending, among other factors, their age, gender, field of work, and geographic location; that is, on the basis of their demographics. This project will overcome this limitation by developing methods for demographic-aware lexical semantics, where people-centric information complements language-based information. This work will help improve systems for natural language communication between people and computers, such as Siri or Alexa, as well as improve systems for automatically translating between different languages.

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in research in lexical semantics using corpus-based approaches such as distributional vector-space models and word embeddings. At the same time, the growth of Web 2.0 has led to tremendous volumes of texts, most of which are rich in explicit or implicit demographic information, such as the age, gender, industry, or location of the writer. The goal of this project is to take the next natural step at the confluence of these two trends, and develop methods for demographic-aware lexical semantics, where people-centric information complements language-based information for enhanced linguistic representations that explicitly account for the demographics and traits of the people behind the language. The project targets the following three main research objectives. First, it develops novel demographic-aware word representations models that account not only for contextual knowledge but also for people-centric information. Methods that are explored include distributional vector-space models that can be composed to create demographic-aware vector-space representations for various demographic profiles, and joint word embeddings that combine generic context-based embeddings with specialized embeddings that reflect the specifics of given demographic dimensions. Second, building upon extensive previous work in behavioral studies targeting the identification of systematic heterogeneity across groups, lab studies are devised to validate the findings from the computational models. Third, the application of these novel people-centric word representations to three core tasks in natural language processing are explored, ranging from simple to complex, namely: word associations, text similarity, and diversified news.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.