If only fish genes could talk,

they would probably be telling their most intimate stories to Dr Daria Onichtchouk, our seminar’s guest speaker this week. An expert on embryonic development, she is especially interested in that little miracle of creation called MZT – Maternal to Zygotic Transition. It is the stage in embryonic development during which development comes under the exclusive control of the zygotic genome. With the help of her loyal zebra fish, Dr. Onitchchouk will take seminar participants on a tour through genome activation.

Thursday, April 25, 2014

13.30 – 15.00

Beijing-1 Auditorium, China cluster

Skolkovo School of Management

Title: «PLURIPOTENCY TRANSCRIPTION FACTORS IN VERTEBRATE EMBRYOS»

Here’s some useful background information.

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:

Development of multi-cellular animals is initially controlled by maternal gene products, deposited in the oocyte. During the maternal-to-zygotic transition, maternal transcripts become destabilized, transcription of zygotic genes commences, and developmental control is handed over from maternal to zygotic gene products.

We have shown that zebra-fish Pou5f1, a homologue of the mammalian pluripotency transcription factor Oct4, occupies specific SOX-POU binding sites before the onset of zygotic transcription and directly activates hundreds of the earliest zygotic genes. Later in development, Pou5f1 acts in combination with the pluripotency control transcription factors SoxB1 and Nanog to coordinate temporal and spatial expression of region-specific genes.

These data position homologues of master pluripotency transcription factors of ES-cells at the center of the zygotic gene activation network in vertebrates and thus provide a link between zygotic gene activation and pluripotency control.

Our further goal is to understand the regulatory mechanisms used by individual pluripotency factors and dissect their unique contribution to the rapid and robust activation of the zygotic genome and to subsequent developmental events.

Our experimental system of zebrafish embryos is uniquely suited for this purpose, due to the viability of fish mutants in pluripotency transcription factors, synchronous development of the embryos, and amenability to high quality quantitative data acquisition.

 * The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) is a private graduate research university in Skolkovo, Russia, a suburb of Moscow. Established in 2011 in collaboration with MIT, Skoltech educates global leaders in innovation, advance scientific knowledge, and foster new technologies to address critical issues facing Russia and the world. Applying international research and educational models, the university integrates the best Russian scientific traditions with twenty-first century entrepreneurship and innovation.

Prof Tudor Ratiu
April 21, 2014, 13.30 – 15.00
Beijing-1 Auditorium, China cluster
Skolkovo School of Management

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:
In spite of is ubiquity in nature, a rigorous mathematical definition of symmetry has emerged only in the late 19th century. Ever since, symmetry has been at the center of many scientific and technological developments. In mathematics, symmetry plays nowadays a central role and has generated an enormous body of knowledge in the pure areas. With few exceptions, mainly in theoretical physics, symmetry considerations have not entered the mainstream in applied areas till the end of the 20th century. In this talk, I will give several examples where symmetry considerations have led to remarkable results in applied areas, in the context of conservative systems. The workhorses are the momentum map and the associated symmetric reduction theory, objects from symmetric symplectic and Poisson geometry that have given rise to deep insights in pure mathematics and are in the process to reshape many applied areas. Several basic equations of motion in theoretical physics are obtained from fundamental principles by a symmetry reduction process. This has immediate consequences in the analysis of these equations and their numerical simulations. Symmetry turns out to be also the glue that ties together such diverse areas as fluid mechanics and computational anatomy. The basic models of liquid crystal dynamics are based on complicated symmetries that are crucial for their understanding. The falling cat rotational motion at zero angular momentum, a possible model of spacecraft docking, is explained using symmetry considerations from gauge theory.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:
Tudor Ratiu is Chaired Professor of Mathematics at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne and Founding Director of the Bernoulli Center. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980. He then spent three years as a T.H. Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then joined the Mathematics Department of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Four years later he took a Professor position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he stayed till his 1998 appointment in Lausanne. He was an NSF postdoctoral, Sloan Foundation, Fulbright, and, recently, was elected an AMS Fellow. He held a Miller Research Professorship at Berkeley and a Humboldt Senior Professorship in Germany. He won the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize of the Catalan Mathematical Society for his book “Momentum Maps and Hamiltonian Reduction”, joint with Juan-Pablo Ortega, and was awarded the Medal “Star of Romania”.
Tudor’s main interests are in geometric mechanics, mathematical physics, continuum mechanics, Hamiltonian dynamics, stability and bifurcation theory, global analysis, geometric integration, evolutionary PDEs, control theory, integrable systems, symplectic and Poisson geometry, Lie theory, and infinite dimensional geometry. He has published over 200 papers and seven books (one of them translated into both German and Chinese), and has given over 320 invited talks. His research investigates the role of symmetry in nature. All his work, including his most abstract, is motivated by applications. This has led him to both pure and applied mathematical areas and to close collaboration with physicists and engineers.

Prof. Sheen S. Levine
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (Columbia University_
Thursday, April 10, 2014
11:30 – 13:00
Room Beijing 1, Skolkovo School of Management, China cluster

ABSTRACT:

The principles of open collaboration for innovation, once distinctive to open source software, are now found in many other ventures. Some of these ventures are Internet based: for example, Wikipedia and online communities. Others are off-line: they are found in medicine, science, and everyday life. Such ventures have been affecting traditional firms and may represent a new organizational form. Despite the impact of such ventures, their operating principles and performance are not well understood. Here we define open collaboration (OC), the underlying set of principles, and propose that it is a robust engine for innovation and production. First, we review multiple OC ventures and identify four defining principles. In all instances, participants create goods and services of economic value, they exchange and reuse each other’s work, they labor purposefully with just loose coordination, and they permit anyone to contribute and consume. These principles distinguish OC from other organizational forms, such as firms or cooperatives. Next, we turn to performance. We identify and investigate three elements that affect performance: the cooperativeness of participants, the diversity of their needs, and the degree to which the goods are rival. We find that OC performs well even in seemingly harsh environments: when cooperators are a minority, free riders are present, diversity is lacking, or goods are rival. We conclude that OC is viable and likely to expand into new domains.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:

Sheen S. Levine earned his Ph.D at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. There he began linking micro and macro—asking how people’s decisions and interaction affect firms, markets, and greater society. Now part of the behavioral strategy field, he answers such questions by collaborating with organizational theorists, economists, sociologists, and psychol- ogists, employing modeling, experiments, and fieldwork. His research has been cited by scholars in business, sociology, psychology and economics. It has also been relied upon in computer science, physics and mathematics. He taught business strategy, global strategic management, organizational theory and corporate social responsibility to undergraduate, graduate and executive audiences in the US, Europe and Asia. Levine also serves as a senior editor of Management and Organization Review.

Dr Rustam Khaliullin
April 3, 2014
13.30 – 15.00
Beijing-1 Auditorium, China cluster (Skolkovo School of Management)

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:

Absolutely localized molecular orbitals (ALMOs) provide a natural and accurate description of the electronic structure of materials.

In this presentation, I will show that, with properly constructed mathematical and computational methods, ALMOs will not only enable atomistic simulations of materials on previously inaccessible time and length scales, but also provide unprecedented insight into electronic origins of some of their unique macroscopic properties. I will discuss exciting new frontiers opened by ALMO-based techniques for computational design of nanomaterials for clean renewable energy generation and storage.

 SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:

Rustam Z. Khaliullin is a Swiss National Science Foundation fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany. His research interests include developing novel approaches for computational modeling of materials on the nanoscale. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2007 working jointly with Prof. Martin Head-Gordon and Prof. Alexis T. Bell. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Michele Parrinello at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and with Juerg Hutter at the University of Zurich.

Dr.  Alexander Solovev

March 24, 2014

13.30 – 15.00

Beijing-1 Auditorium, China cluster

Skolkovo School of Management

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:

Diminishing resources, change of climate, fuel production, minimally-invasive medicine – one of the possible highly-effective ways to face these huge challenges is through discovery, innovation and application of novel nanoscale materials, devices and machines. A three-dimensional-membrane nanotechnology was started from the discovery of a strain-driven self-rolling of heteroepitaxial semiconductor nanotubes by Russian scientist V.Y. Prinz in 1995. When released from the substrate, these nanomembranes become extremely flexible and self-assemble into micro- and nanotubes due to lattice mismatch and inherent strain between the layers.

Nowdays, rollable nanomembranes are made of a variety of  materials (metals, semiconductors, insulators, organics or hybrids) with excellent control over the thicknesses of layers, number of rotations and a rich set of functional properties. Novel prototype materials  are applicable to diverse areas and hold significant promise for the development of infinity nanomaterials.

A cornucopia of potential applications are possible in energy, electronics, photonics, biomedical, chemical nanotechnologies and man-made nanomachines. This presentation will discuss the concepts, challenges and opportunities of shaped three-dimensional nanomembranes, their technological relevancy and important breakthroughs.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:

Dr. Alexander A. Solovev earned a diploma in mechanical engineering from Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in 2003. He then moved to Germany and graduated from the international Master of Science in Engineering Physics program at the Walther Schottky Institute at the Physics Department of the Technical University of Munich  in 2006.

During 2003–2004 he was a visiting scholar in the chemistry departments of Princeton University, NJ and Columbia University in the City of New York. In 2012 he finished his PhD with great honor at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences, and the Leibniz Insitute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden, Germany. After his PhD, Dr. Solovev continued his postdoctoral appointment in the Chemical Physics  group at the Physics Department of TU Munich. Currently he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Micro-, Nano, and Molecular systems group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart. Dr. Solovev’s awards include: the DSM Science and Technology Award from Switzerland, a Max Planck Fellowship, the DAAD prize for international scholars, best chemistry experiment for the public from Society for Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and holds the Guinness World Record in nanotechnology for the smallest man-made jet engine. His research interests include the fundamental studies of materials self-organization, far from equilibrium systems, programmable matter, biosensors, nanotools, multipurpose nanomaterials, complex fluidic nanomachines, particularly for on-chip, energy and biomedical applications.

Dr Konstantin Piatkov

March 20, 2014

12.00 – 13.30

Technopark Skolkovo. Business center «Urals» 100 Novaya str., Skolkovo village. Russian Quantum Center.

3d floor. Room 28.3

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:
I will discuss my research on a processive proteolytic system called the N-end rule pathway. Recently we found that this proteolytic pathway can selectively target a number of naturally produced proapoptotic fragments. Our findings indicate that the N-end rule pathway acts to counteract cell death through the degradation of proapoptotic protein fragments, thereby setting specific thresholds that prevent a transient or an otherwise weak apoptotic signal from reaching the point of commitment to apoptosis. In agreement with these results, we showed that even a partial genetic ablation of the N-end rule pathway sensitizes cells to apoptosis. We have also recently demonstrated that the N-end rule pathway selectively degrades specific neurotoxic protein fragments that have been implicated in neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and synucleinopathies, including Parkinson’s disease. These advances not only broadened our understanding of the cellular apoptotic defense mechanisms but also opened up new opportunities to pharmacologically manipulate apoptotic and inflammatory cascades.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:
Dr Konstantin Piatkov has a broad background in molecular biology and protein biochemistry. He published 26 peer-reviewed papers that were cited more than 600 times. Konstantin received both his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Biology from the Ural State University, which he graduated with summa cum laude in 1998.
Konstantin earned his PhD degree in Molecular Biology at the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology in 2001 under the supervision of Professor Mikhail Evgen’ev. During PhD work in Russia, his research was focused on mobile genetic elements and their role in genome stability. This work resulted in several publications in international journals including such leading journals as PNAS and Nature Genetics.
Following his PhD work Dr Piatkov had brief periods as a visiting scientist in the UK and Germany resulting in publications in PNAS and Cell. He subsequently moved to the California Institute of Technology and joined the group of Alex Varshavsky – a leading international authority in the field of protein homeostasis and biogenesis. In this group Konstantin developed several novel approaches for analysis of mechanisms underlying regulated protein degradation and made seminal contributions to our understanding of role of protein degradation in apoptosis, neurodegeneration and DNA repair. He developed a novel concept of sensitizing cancer cells to chemotherapeutic agents by modulating their protein degradation machinery. This approach opens as yet unexplored avenue to creation of combinational cancer therapies that have high effectiveness and low toxicity than conventional chemotherapies. Konstantin’s most recent results were published in the leading international journals including Molecular Cell and PNAS, and were cited over 140 times.
In 2010, Dr Piatkov joined the staff at Caltech, where he continues his work on molecular mechanisms of regulated protein degradation.

We are proud to invite you to seminars by Dr. Marco Lisi on this week!

13 of March, 1 pm (Hypercube)  –  Seminar “Galileo, the European Navigation System: Status and Challenges”.

14 of March, 5 pm (Hypercube) – Lecture  “An introduction to Service Systems Engineering”.

About the speaker: 

Dr. ing. Marco Lisi is presently GNSS Services Engineering Manager at the European Space Agency, in the Directorate of GALILEO Programme and Navigation related activities. In this position he is responsible for the engineering and exploitation of services based on the European navigation infrastructures, Galileo and EGNOS. He was previously responsible for the systems engineering, operations and security activities in the Galileo project.

In October 2012, he was appointed Special Advisor of the European Commission on European space policies.

After getting a “summa cum laude” doctorate in engineering in 1980, he has worked for more than thirty years in the aerospace and telecommunications sectors, covering managerial positions in R&D, engineering and programs, both in industry and in institutional organizations. During his professional career, he was directly involved in a number of major satellite programs: Italsat, Olympus, Artemis, Meteosat Operational, Meteosat Second Generation, Sicral 1A, Globalstar, Cosmo-Skymed, Galileo.

Dr. ing. Lisi is Senior Member of IEEE (“Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers”) and of AIAA (“American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics”), Member of ION (“Institute of Navigations. He is also Fellow Member of the British Interplanetary Society and “Honorary Life President” of the Italian chapter of INCOSE (Ïnternational Council on Systems Engineering”), that he founded in 2008.

Dr. ing. Lisi holds four international patents and authored more than one hundred and fifty technical papers.

Abstracts:

Galileo, the European Navigation Satellite System: Status and Challenges

The Galileo global navigation satellite system, joint initiative by the European Union and the European Space Agency, is one of the most ambitious and technologically advanced service-oriented systems being developed in Europe.

Galileo, Europe’s contribution to the future GNSS system of systems, is a state-of-the-art global navigation satellite system, providing highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning, navigation and timing services under civilian control. Galileo will at the same time be interoperable with GPS and GLONASS, the two other global satellite navigation systems.

With 4 satellites in space, launched by pair on 21 October 2011 and 12 October 2012 from Kourou, French Guiana, the Galileo project has just successfully completed the In-Orbit Validation (IOV) phase, aimed at qualifying the Galileo space, ground and user segments through extensive in-orbit/on-ground tests and operations of a core satellite constellation and of the associated ground segment.

The In-Orbit Validation (IOV) architecture is being implemented as an integral part of the Full Operational Capability (FOC), i.e. the complete system, consisting of 30 satellites and a set of remote stations distributed worldwide to command and monitor the constellation and deliver the navigation and timing services to the users. Now that the overall design has been validated, the system will be progressively completed, in a staggered approach, to reach the FOC.

Full operations and services will commence when all the satellites have been deployed.

However, after a political decision of Vice-President Antonio Tajani, then included by President Manuel Barroso in the agenda of the European Commission, Galileo will start delivering Early Services as from the end of 2014.

The presentation will summarizes the present status of the Galileo development and procurement activities. Moreover, it will describe the engineering of Galileo as a service-oriented system, in terms of service infrastructures, organization, methodologies, processes and procedures.

An Introduction to Service Systems Engineering

The increasing need for large and complex systems, focused on the provision of services, derives from the paradigm shift taking place in the world, i.e. the advent of a service-based economy.

Service (or service-oriented) systems are systems meant to provide value-added services through the use of technology (mainly communications and computer technologies).

A “service system” (or value co-creation system) has been defined as a dynamic configuration of people, technology, organizational networks and shared information (such as languages, processes, metrics, prices, policies, and laws) designed to deliver services that satisfy the needs, wants, or aspirations of customers.

Service systems engineering (also known as Service Science Management & Engineering, SSME) is a branch of systems engineering that focuses on problems and issues that arise in the design and development of service oriented systems.

Applying systems engineering to service systems, specific systems engineering methods are needed. In particular, traditional system development methods, essentially requirements-driven, are best suited for systems based on a specific and static set of requirements. In service systems, characterized by a higher dependence on operational constraints and by an increasing volatility of requirements, such methods become less viable and effective.

From this perspective, model-driven system development methods result in system architectures more able to capture the different “views” of the system (technical, technological, operational) and to cope with evolving mission or business needs.

A service should be developed and delivered to achieve maximum customer satisfaction at minimum cost. One crucial question is: how to define, measure or evaluate service performance?

While functional and technical performance are typically defined in the System Requirements Document (SRD) and operational requirements and scenarios are described in the Concept of Operations (CONOPS) document, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) also needs to be provided, defining expected service behavior and non-functional properties of the service delivered in terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

The presentation will address service systems engineering from various perspectives, to conclude that the design of a complex service enterprise requires a wide range of skills and expertise’s, covering organizational, engineering, social, legal and contractual aspects.

A typical SLA defines Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and Key Quality Indicators (KQI’s), with target values and target ranges to be achieved over a certain time period.

Several evaluation measures can be identified and tracked. As far as processes are concerned, performance (Quality, Reliability, Throughput), productivity (Efficiency, Effectiveness) and safeguards (Security, Safety) are to be monitored over time.

Service systems are often very large systems, developed and deployed worldwide. Extensive logistics and maintenance support capabilities are therefore required. The “Through-life system approach” looks at a system from its initial definition through its in-service-management and down to its disposal (“from cradle to grave”), recognizing the value of a concurrent engineering and that the initial purchase cost (and risk) of a system is only a small fraction of the total cost of procurement.

This is particularly applicable to large space-based systems, conceived to be in service for a long time: in this case the evolution of the system (up-gradings and modifications) has to be built into the program from the beginning.

In service systems, the human factor becomes very important. Let us think, as a matter of example, to the operations of a large space-based system, where hundreds of people will be involved. As the human component of systems increases, issues related to human-machine interactions and to poor training or operational procedures will also increase. Indeed, a US DoD study has shown that 40 to 60 per cent of the total cost over the system’s lifecycle is for manpower, personnel and training. A human-centered design approach is needed, that is part of the holistic approach mentioned earlier.

Last but not least, since service systems are real-time in nature, the human decision maker or service provider will increasingly become a bottleneck in the overall process. Organizational and governance aspects need to be carefully addressed.

Dr Daniil I Kolokolov
February 13, 2014
12.00 – 13.30
Beijing-1 Auditorium, China cluster (Skolkovo School of Management)

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:

The development of new energy sources and processes that allow using the available energy more effectively involves the systematic design, characterization and production of new materials (catalysts, molecular sieves/sorbents, PEM fuel cells). These novel compounds in most cases represent complex, heterogeneous systems containing mobile molecular species. The latter usually being the key elements of the systems organization. Thus in order to meet this new functionality the experimental characterization of molecular mobility in complex systems is an important challenge
In my talk I will give several specific examples showing the diversity and importance of the problem and give a brief overview of the experimental and computational techniques that allow following the dynamical phenomena on molecular level. Further, I will introduce neutron scattering and deuterium solid state NMR as efficient methods to probe molecular mobility in wide time and space scales. I will give some examples of successful application of these methods on systems of practical interest: solid acid catalysts and microporous metal-organic frameworks. Finally, I will emphasize some current challenges and prominent systems for future research.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:

Dr Daniil Kolokolov graduated from department of physics of the Novosibirsk State University in 2007 (MS). He obtained the PhD degree in University of Lyon 1, France within the joint PhD program between Lyon’s university and Boreskov Institute of Catalysis in Russia.
From the early stage of education Daniil was interested in dynamical phenomena in complex, heterogeneous systems on the border between chemistry and physics. To pursue that interest he joined the solid state nuclear magnetic resonance group lead by professor Alexander Stepanov in the Boreskov Institute of Catalysis (SB RAS, Novosibirsk) to study by means of 2H NMR molecular dynamics in microporous media used as catalysts or sorbents. After graduation Dr Kolokolov used the opportunity of the joint PhD program to start the collaboration with professor Herve Jobic in IRCELYON (CNRS, Lyon) and to expand his experimental skills by introducing the neutron scattering techniques.
After getting the PhD degree Dr Kolokolov continued to pursue the goal of experimental detection of dynamical phenomena in complex systems based on novel materials, mainly for catalysis, chemicals purification processes based on adsorption, and fuel cells.
Daniil speaks 4 languages: Russian, English, Italian and French.