Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The workshop begins on November 12 with three 1-hour tutorial lectures and continues with morning and afternoon sessions until November 14. The aim of this workshop is to bring together these different communities from research (Internet Topology Measurement, Economics, Theoretical Computer Science, Network Science) and related industry (ISPs, Content Providers, CDNs etc.) to help narrow the gap between research and operational practice. See the complete program, list of speakers and register to attend.

Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University, with support from the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation, are hosting a series of 9 mini-conferences from November 2010 - April 2013. The seventh in the series will be held at Emory University on November 3-4, 2012. This mini-conference's featured speaker is Dr. Penny Haxell, who will give two one-hour lectures. Additionally, there will be five one-hour talks and seven half-hour talks given by other invited speakers. See all titles, abstracts, and schedule.

A discussion of possible papers for upcoming weeks.

Mechanical forces play a key role in the shaping of versatile morphologies of thin structures in natural and synthetic systems. The morphology and deformation of thin ribbons, plates and rods and their instabilities are systematically investigated, through both theoretical modeling and table-top experiments. An elasticity theory combining differential geometry and stationarity principles is developed for the spontaneous bending and twisting of ribbons with tunable geometries in presence of mechanical anisotropy. Closed-form predictions are obtained from this theory with no adjustable parameters, and validated with simple, table-top experiments that are in excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions. For large deformation of ribbons and plates, a more general theory is developed to account for mechanical instability (slap-bracelet type) induced by geometric nonlinearity, due to the competition between inhomogeneous bending and mid-plane stretching energy. This comprehensive, reduced parameter model leads to unique predictions about multistability that are validated with a series of table-top experiments. Furthermore, this study has been extended to interpret a different type of snap-through instability that the Venus flytrap has been actively employing to capture insects for millions of years, and the learnt principle is used to guide the design of bio-mimetic flytrap robot.