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Vigil to mark earthquake anniversary
“Healing the Light,” a candlelight vigil marking the one-month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, will take place at 4 p.m. April 11 at Baird Point, North Campus.
The vigil, which is sponsored by the Graduate Student Association, is open to all members of the university community.
Candles will be provided by GSA.
Donations for the victims of the tragedy will be collected and forwarded to the American Red Cross for distribution.
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Flags at half-mast tomorrow
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has directed that flags on state government buildings—including those at UB—be flown at half-mast on April 8 in honor of Army Sergeant Michael S. Lammerts, a Tonawanda resident who died in Afghanistan on April 4.
Lammerts died of wounds from small arms fire in Faryab Province.
Cuomo has ordered that flags on all state buildings be lowered to half-mast in honor of and tribute to New York service members who are killed in action or die in a combat zone.
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Khan to speak
Irene Zubaida Khan, immediate past secretary general of Amnesty International who is teaching in the UB Law School this semester, will discuss the future of human rights during a lecture on April 12 at the law school.
The lecture, sponsored by the Buffalo Human Rights Center in the UB Law School, will take place from 4-5:30 p.m. in 106 O’Brian Hall, North Campus.
Khan is teaching two seminars this semester: a “Business and Human Rights” seminar focusing on the notion of corporate accountability for human rights, an emerging area of international law; and a “Poverty and Human Rights” seminar examining the application of international human rights law to public policy initiatives addressing the issue of poverty in the developing world.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
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Capasso to deliver Rustgi lecture
Federico Capasso, Robert Wallace Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, will speak on "Quantum Cascade Lasers: Widely Tailorable Light Sources from the Mid-infrared to the Far-infrared" at the 17th annual Moti Lal Rustgi Memorial Lecture, to take place at 5 p.m. April 11 in Woldman Theater, 112 Knox Hall, North Campus.
The Rustgi lecture, presented by the Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences, will be free and open to the public.
Capasso, who also holds an appointment as Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is co-inventor of the Quantum Cascade Laser, which has numerous applications in physics, chemistry and engineering.
He joined the Harvard faculty in 2003 after a 27-year research career at Bell Laboratories, where he became a Bell Labs Fellow and held several management positions, including vice president for physical research.
His research has spanned a broad range of topics in the areas of electronics, photonics, mesoscopic physics, nanotechnology and quantum electrodynamics.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Member of the Franklin Institute.
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Theatre and Dance to present ‘Side Man’
The Department of Theatre and Dance will present the Tony Award-winning play “Side Man” April 13-17 in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.
Performances will be at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday.
Winner of the 1999 Tony Award for Best Play, “Side Man” follows Clifford, the only son of a skilled jazz trumpeter and an alcoholic mother, as he relives three decades of key moments in his family's life—from the moment his parents met to their pain as the rise of rock-and-roll triggers the decline of jazz, and with it, their livelihood. The play follows the change in the life pulse of American music as it plays out through the fortunes of a group of quirky, passionate jazz musicians and a small American family.
The UB performance of “Side Man” is directed by Robert Knopf, professor of theatre and dance, with a cast of UB BFA and BA students.
Tickets for “Side Man” are $18 for general admission and $10 for students from any school and seniors. They are available at the CFA box office and at all Ticketmaster locations, including Ticketmaster.com.
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NCOR to co-sponsor D.C. workshop
The National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), headquartered at UB and Stanford University, is co-sponsoring the ODISSEE (Ontology Driven Implementation of Semantic Services for the Enterprise Environment) Workshop, a two-day meeting being held next week in Washington, D.C., that aims at fostering awareness of and collaboration between disparate information-sharing efforts across the U.S. government.
The workshop will feature individual presentations on information-sharing, as well as panel sessions on ontology and data vocabulary.
Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Julian Park Professor of Philosophy at UB and director of NCOR, will be among the speakers at the workshop, discussing “Using Ontologies to Support Information Integration: Case Studies from Bioinformatics and Defense.”
In addition to NCOR, the meeting is being co-sponsored by Alion Science and Technology, and the NextGen Joint Planning and Development Office.
The NextGen program is a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort of the FAA, NASA, White House and the departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security and Transportation aimed at developing a method of tracking air traffic more precisely and efficiently in a way that will save fuel, reduce noise and pollution, cut down on delays and save billions of dollars in costs.
UB philosophy alumni Lowell Vizenor and Ryan Kohl are involved with the NextGen project.
Smith says a central focus of the ODISSEE workshop “is the challenge of information-sharing that is at the heart of the transformation from the current state of the National Airspace System to NextGen capabilities in 2025 in such areas as unmanned aircraft systems, integrated surveillance and weather.”
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