If you have ideas or suggestions for a new venue or sponsor or if you would like to become involved in the organization of the CU Café Sci, please leave a response here (or contact us by email). Thanks!

Ideally, a café scientifique should be held off-campus, one evening a month in a space where attendees can buy themselves a drink or a snack and sit at tables where they can hear a researcher speak and answer questions (in other words, no music during that time). Often it is on an evening where a cafe or bar does not usually have a big crowd so hosting the CU Café Sci improves their business for that evening. There is no admission charge and the speakers are not paid a fee. Plus, it’s fun and you attract a crowd who might not have been to your venue before!

If at all possible, we’d like to keep the event in downtown Champaign.

MacArthur fellow and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Kieffer has degrees in math, physics, geology, and planetary science. Her research centers on “very high speed flows”, including those involved in meterorite impacts, volcanic eruptions and river flooding. She has published models for the eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io, the lateral blast of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, the dynamics of the Old Faithful geyser, the hydraulics of the Colorado River, and the dynamics of the Chixculub meteor impact that is believed to have caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. She is also co-founder of Kieffer & Woo, Inc., a company specializing in nonlinear data analysis and prediction algorithms.

In her “spare time” she enjoys playing music and she worked with a Phoenix high school teacher to develop a new way of teaching science to a group of homeless and at-risk students—now one of the most popular and self-esteem-building courses at the school.

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Speech recognition machines are in use in more and more devices and services.  Airlines, banks, and telephone companies provide information to customers via spoken queries.  You can buy hand-held devices, appliances, and PCs that are operated by spoken commands. And, for around $100, you can buy a program for your laptop that will transcribe speech into text.  Unfortunately, automatic speech recognition systems are quite error prone, nor do they understand the meanings of spoken messages in any significant way.  Levinson argues that to do so, speech recognition machines would have to  possess the same kinds of cognitive abilities that humans display.  Engineers have been trying to build machines with human-like abilities to think and use language for nearly 60 years without much success.  Are all such efforts doomed to failure?  Maybe not.  Dr Levinson suggests that if we take a radically different approach, we might succeed. If, instead of trying to program machines to behave intelligently, we design them to learn by experiencing the real world in the same way a child does, we might solve the speech recognition problem in the process.  This is the ambitious goal of the research now being conducted in Levinson’s laboratory.  To date, Dr Levinson and his colleagues have constructed three robots that have attained some rudimentary visual navigation and object manipulation abilities which they can perform under spoken command

Stephen E. Levinson was born in New York City  on  September  27, 1944.  He received the B. A. degree in Engineering Sciences from Harvard in 1966, and the M. S. and Ph.D.  degrees  in  Electrical Engineering from the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island in 1972 and 1974, respectively.  From 1966-1969 he  was  a design engineer at Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics in Groton, Connecticut.  From 1974-1976 he held a J. Willard  Gibbs Instructorship in Computer Science at Yale University.  In 1976, he joined the technical staff of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ  where he conducted research in the areas of speech recognition and understanding.  In 1979 he was a visiting researcher at the NTT Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan.  In  1984, he held a visiting fellowship in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University.  In 1990, Dr. Levinson became head of the Linguistics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories where he directed research in Speech Synthesis, Speech Recognition and Spoken Language Translation. In 1997, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he teaches courses in Speech and Language Processing and leads research projects in speech synthesis and automatic language acquisition.  Dr. Levinson is a member of the  Association  for Computing Machinery, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.   He is a founding editor of the journal Computer Speech and Language and a former member and chair of the Industrial Advisory Board of the CAIP Center at Rutgers University.  He is the author of more than 80 technical papers and holds seven patents. His new book is entitled “Mathematical Models for Speech Technology”
At Bell Laboratories in the 1970s, Dr Levinson conducted research on speech recognition and cybernetics. In 1990, he became head of the Linguistics Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs, directing research on speech synthesis, speech recognition, and spoken language translation. Since 1997, he has been with the University of Illinois, where he teaches courses and conducts research on speech and language processing. He is a founding editor of the journal Computer Speech and Language, the author of more than 60 technical papers and holder of seven patents. He has also written a book: Mathematical Models for Speech Technology. Professor Levinson is a fellow of the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America.

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Dr Suarez is on the entomology faculty at UIUC where he teaches graduate seminars on “Biological Invasions” and “Social Insects” along with several introductory level courses including “Ecological Effects of Globalization” and “Animal Behavior”. He also teaches an Ant Course in Costa Rica for The California Academy of Sciences. His research centers on the mechanisms and impact of biological invasions, the patterns and mechanisms of nestmate recognition in social insects, and the effect of habitat fragmentation on animals.

His research on trap jaw ants was recently featured on the BBC and he his work on the invasion of Argentine ants appeared in a New York Times article on global warming.

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Professor Jakobsson’s research centers on the ion channels within cell membranes. Ion channels serve several functions, including the generation of electrical power, electrical and electro-chemical signalling, generation of osmotic pressure and flow, and as energy transducers. It is hoped that a greater understanding of these ion channels will lead to the development of nanoconductors to mimic the functionality of their biological counterparts.

Dr Jakobsson has degrees in chemical engineering and physics and was named a fellow of the American Physical Society for his work on ion and water permeability of cell membranes. From 2003 until 2005, he served as director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH, a center that supports research and training in areas that join biology with the computer sciences, engineering, mathematics and physics. He also served as chair of the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative at NIH.
His proudest accomplishment is being a grandfather.

The National Center for Biomimetic Nanoconductors was founded as part of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) Nanomedicine initiative. Nanomedicine, an offshoot of nanotechnology, refers to medical intervention at the molecular scale for curing disease or repairing damaged tissues, such as bone, muscle, or nerve.
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Author of over 150 scientific papers, 2 best-selling textbooks and a popular science book called Revenge of the Microbes, Professor Salyers holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a PhD in physics which she taught at the university level for 10 years before making the transition to microbiology. She was president of the American Society for Microbiology in 2001-2002 (during the anthrax-letters crisis), has testified before Congress on genetically-modified plants, and provided expert testimony on antibiotic use in agriculture for various European and US regulatory agencies. Her research is focused on the bacteria found in the human intestinal tract and in particular how these bacterial colonies develop resistance to antibiotics.

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Ty Newell, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Assistant Dean of the College of Engineering, is known for his project-based undergraduate courses in fluid mechanics and heat transfer. Last year, he served as an advisor to the hydraulic-powered bicycle design team and this year he is working with a group of students who will be competing in the Solar Decathlon project, designing and constructing a solar powered house.

His research activities are focused on heat transfer and energy systems.

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