Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Effective Teaching Based on Designing and Modeling of 3D Printed Artifacts

When: Monday, August 29, 2016
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Stefan Andrei, Chairman of Department of Computer Science, Lamar University

Host: Dr. Albert Cheng

Designing a physical model is now possible due to 3D printing technology. The 3D printing technology, also known as additive manufacturing (AM), is used for creating three-dimensional objects from a digital Standard Tessellation Language (STL) file. A 3D printer is a type of industrial robot. Additive manufacturing is a term for describing a set of technologies that create 3D objects by adding layer-upon-layer of material. Materials can vary from technology to technology. But there are some common features for all AM, such as usage of computer together with a special 3D modeling software. The first thing to start this process is to create the Computer Assisted Design (CAD) sketch, also known as the computer model (saved in a file). Then the AM device reads data from the CAD file and builds up a structure layer by layer from printing material, which can be plastic, liquid, metal, powder filaments or even sheet of paper. There are many areas where additive manufacturing is currently applied: aerospace, art and sculpture, consumers, entertainment, fashion, food, jewelry, makers, medical and dental, and transport. The presentation will also reveal the Context-Free Grammar that may be used to describe a digital STL file (to the best of our knowledge, no one showed a generative grammar for an STL file so far).

Bio:

Dr. Stefan Andrei graduated B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Cuza University of Iasi, Romania, in 1994 and 1995, respectively. He got his PhD from Hamburg University, Germany, in 2000 as a World Bank Scholarship Japan Graduate student. He was a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from Singapore-MIT Alliance between 2002 and 2005. He is currently an Associate Professor and the Chair of Department of Computer Science with Lamar University.

His research interests include real-time embedded systems and software engineering. He has more than 21 years teaching courses such as, real-time embedded systems, software engineering, foundations of computer science, computer law and ethics, and programming languages. Stefan has been on the Program Committee for more than 50 prestigious conferences. He was invited as a Speaker at several universities and private organizations. He has already been a co-author of more than 100 peer reviewed papers at international reputable journals and conferences. Among his main contributions, he proved the problem of incremental counting satisfiability and invented the LRTL (Linear Real-Time Logic) useful for verification of real-time embedded systems specifications.

His research got more than 220 non-self-scientific citations. He was and is involved as a PI, co-PI, or Senior Personnel in more than 12 funded research projects. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and an IEEE Member. More details about Stefan may be found at the address: cs.lamar.edu