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Top Hat
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Rensselaer in Brief
Grant awarded
3Com, in collaboration with the U.S. Conference of Mayors, recently awarded a $1 million Urban Challenge Grant to the city of Troy. The grant is part of a $1,000,000 program established to assist 10 U.S. cities in integrating technology into their communities and improving education and public communication systems.

It will help funding for the Connected Kids Project, developed by the city in partnership with RPI in 1999.

According to Teri Harrison, professor of language, literature, and communication who heads the Rensselaer faculty side of Connected Kids, the project is a citywide effort to create an online, self-service database that will enhance Troy youth programs.

Through the grant, 3Com will be expanding technology-focused education and providing wireless network equipment that is necessary to facilitate technology training for program staff and Troy school teachers.

The city of Troy, which will administer the grant, is currently in the process of working along with several community partners in order to determine the best use for the network equipment and hardware.

Harrison, with Jim Zappen, associate professor of communication and rhetoric, and Sibel Adali, assistant professor of computer science, are seeking to obtain additional funding for the software development part of the project through the National Science Foundation’s Digital Government Program.

Program recognized
Success magazine recently ranked Rensselaer’s Lally School of Management and Technology sixth on its annual list of the 50 "Best Entrepreneurial Business Schools" in the country.

Criteria used in the survey to select schools include the weighting of faculty, students, curriculum, community outreach, follow-up graduates, innovative programs, and reputation among fellow business schools.

"To make the list of best entrepreneurial business schools shows superior innovation and accomplishments," said Success publisher Victoria Conte.

The school rankings appear in the February/March issue of Success.

The Lally School, which distinguished itself from more than 250 entrepreneurial programs in the U.S., has long worked with the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship to produce an entrepreneurial breeding ground.

"It is wonderful to receive this recognition," said Joseph Ecker, dean of the Lally School. "Entrepreneurship has always been a hallmark of the Lally School, but it’s nice to find ourselves named a top 10 school."

RPI’s entrepreneurial culture was aided recently by a $1 million grant from trustee and alumnus Mike Herman ’62, given to the Institute to integrate entrepreneurship throughout the curriculum of the fall semester.

The Kaufman Foundation for Entrepreneurial Leadership also recently selected the Severino Center to lead a nationwide pilot program called Technology Enhanced Entrepreneurship Education.

This May, more than 30 professors from around the U.S. will gather at Rensselaer for a three-day clinic designed to help introduce faculty to the state of the art in technology-enhanced learning.

In Success’s rankings, Babson College was ranked first followed by UCLA, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Depaul University, and the University of St. Thomas.

The full entrepreneurial rankings will be available on the Web March 13 at http://www.successmagazine.com/ 2_01stories/toc.htm/.

Earthquakes studied
A Rensselaer team of earthquake researchers will be receiving $2.38 million from the National Science Foundation as part of the NSF’s larger effort to form a collaborative Internet effort that will promote earthquake engineering research and information around the U.S.

The 10 institutions currently involved in the project will together receive a combined $45 million in equipment awards as part of the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation.

Through NEES, a collaborative effort designed to improve the seismic design and performance of the U.S. civil and mechanical engineering infrastructure, the NSF plans to spend up to $81.9 million by 2004 in order to meet its goals.

Richard Dobry, professor of civil engineering and chief investigator on the Rensselaer end of the project, said that the funds from NSF will be used to develop, upgrade, and install new software and equipment—including an in-flight earthquake simulator and in-flight robot—on the "one-ton 100-G" geotechnical centrifuge in the basement of the JEC.

"The tremendous progress and increase in capabilities of sensors, Web-based data acquisition systems, and other technologies—as well as the fast growth of Internet-based capabilities for teleobservation and teleoperation of experiments and distributed computations—mean that the context and meaning of our experimental work will be completely transformed in the next few years. "This is a great use of information technology in earthquake research," said Dobry.

He added that Ahmed W. Elamal, a former colleague and current professor at the University of California at San Diego, will help the Rensselaer team to conduct the first of the system’s remote tests through teleobserving and teleoperating centrifuge experiments at Rensselaer.

Among Dobry’s team are civil engineers Mourad Zenghal, assistant professor and recent NSF Early Career awardee, Tarek Abdoun, research assistant professor, and Professor Thomas Zimmie. Mechanical engineering professors James Li and Stephen Derby will help in designing the new shaker and robot, and civil engineering professors Jacob Fish and Mark Shephard will provide support with computational research and networking development.