Professor Kelvin W. Willoughby

December 16, 2013

13:00 – 14:30

Beijing -1 Auditorium, China cluster Skolkovo School of Management

Prowess in the strategic management of intellectual property, especially internationally, has become a source of competitive advantage for both entrepreneurial firms and established corporations in technology intensive industries. The management of intellectual property is also a core business function for many technology firms. It is also important for R&D intensive organizations such as universities and government research laboratories or specialized organizations involved in technology transfer. In this seminar Professor Willoughby will outline a future research agenda in the field of intellectual property management and make some suggestions as to how such research might also contribute to Skoltech’s mission related to education, innovation and entrepreneurship in science and technology.

One issue that deserves special attention is the question of what strategies may be followed by small Entrepreneurial technology firms to succeed in appropriating value from their technology and enforcing their IP rights against infringement from better funded, more experienced technology enterprises. The challenges faced by technology entrepreneurs in addressing this issue, especially at the start-up stage, can be extraordinary when the competition is international and when the problems straddle the boundaries of multiple national legal systems. A related issue is the role of professional IP Intermediaries in assisting small enterprises to overcome such challenges. Despite the invaluable service that they may provide to entrepreneurs, IP Intermediaries are sometimes also portrayed as the enemies of innovation, and are coming under attack as “non-racticing entity” litigation villains.

The scope for technological entrepreneurship in the exploration and exploitation of oil, gas and minerals Is also a prime research topic. It presents challenging IP strategy issues relevant to Russia and other countries.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:

Dr. Kelvin Willoughby is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Curtin University. His expertise lies in the management of intellectual property, technology-based entrepreneurship, and strategic planning for technology-based industry development. He holds doctorates in both strategic management and technology studies, and a masters degree in intellectual property law.

In addition to his research Willoughby has extensive international experience as an educator, university administrator and director of MBA programs and executive management programs. He was elected Vice President for Technology Entrepreneurship of the US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

Besides his academic experience, Professor Willoughby has been internationally active for many years as a consultant and advisor in industry and government. He was a founding team member of an entrepreneurial digital media management company in the United States and has worked on a project with firms in the electronic, metals and automotive sectors in Germany. He has led a training project on technology transfer for the federal laboratories of the United States Government, and has worked with a leading management consulting company in Europe. He has conducted a number of projects for technology industry associations in the United States, has developed a reputation as an analyst of the biotechnology and medical technology industries, and has co-chaired a statewide assessment and planning project on bio-related industries in Minnesota for a coalition of private-sector and public-sector high technology organizations (the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota).

Professor Willoughby has held a number of prestigious positions at a variety of universities and research institutes in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia.

Dr. Gennady Gor
December 12, 2013
13.00 – 14.30
Beijing – 1 Auditorium, China cluster (Skolkovo School of Management)

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:
Typically porous adsorbents and catalysts (carbons, zeolites, silicas) are considered to be absolutely rigid for most of their applications. However, a number of experiments have shown that all porous materials deform upon adsorption of fluids. The character of such deformation may differ – it can be both expansion and contraction. The magnitude of deformation for the most of the materials is small, with the relative volume change of less than one percent. However, for some systems even such a small change can be critical. Particularly, adsorption-induced deformation is crucial for geological CO2 sequestration and enhanced recovery of natural gas. When carbon dioxide gets adsorbed by porous geological formations (coal beds or shale), the solid swells and larger pores and fractures may close, which dramatically decreases the permeability of the system. Also, adsorption-induced deformation cannot be neglected in the case of MOFs and aerogels, where the magnitude of deformation reaches as much as 30%.
In my presentation I will start from an overview of experimental observations of adsorption-induced deformation for different materials and will briefly discuss the experimental techniques for measuring this deformation. Then I will present a thermodynamic theory of this phenomenon based on the calculation of solvation pressure in the pores; I will show how this pressure can be calculated using macroscopic and molecular-based methods. I will further show the quantitative results for deformation of mesoporous silica which can be directly compared to the experimentally measured results. Finally, I will list some of the current challenges in the studies of adsorption-induced deformation.
SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:
Gennady Gor received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at St. Petersburg State University, Russia, in 2009. In his thesis he developed a novel statistical approach to the kinetic theory of non-isothermal nucleation. During the following two years he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University in the molecular simulations group of Prof. Alex Neimark. While at Rutgers, Dr. Gor developed a th eory of adsorption-induced deformation of mesoporous materials and worked out the molecular models for adsorption and transport of chemical warfare agents in polyelectrolyte membranes. He also elaborated methods for characterization of novel types of nanoporous carbons by nitrogen adsorption, which have been further implemented in commercial instruments by Quantachrome Inc. Since 2011 Dr. Gor is a postdoctoral research associate in the group of Prof. Jean Prevost at Princeton University. Current Dr. Gor’s research is mainly focused on continuum modeling of processes relevant to CO2 sequestration in geological porous media. He developed a computational model for simulations of CO2-brine mixtures leaks, which involves boiling. He also works with Prof. Craig Arnold (Princeton University) on developing a model for simulations of mechanical processes in lithium-ion batteries that cause their aging.

Professor David I.M. Macdonald

December 10, 2013
13.00 – 14.30
Beijing – 1 Auditorium, China cluster (Skolkovo School of Management)

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:
The North Sakhalin Basin in the Russian Far East is one of the world’s most prolific hydrocarbon provinces, with more than 6 Bboe discovered to date. For the past 25 million years the basin has been supplied with sediment by the Amur, which has deposited a thick deltaic sequence throughout the basin. Much of this basin is now exposed onshore in the northern part of Sakhalin. These sediments are being actively exhumed and recycled into offshore areas of the basin because of deformation along the Sakhalin-Hokkaido Shear Zone.
The majority of the sand in the Amur River and its former delta comes from an area 2000 km upstream, shown by uniformity of sediment composition in the lower river. Sediment composition of the modern river is identical to the most recent deltaic deposits in the basin, with a progressive decrease in the proportion of unstable grains with increasing depth and stratigraphic age. Stable mineral ratios and U-Pb ages show that there are only minor variations in Amur sediment composition from the Early Miocene to the present day. This has major implications for risking reservoir quality in oil exploration in the region.
There are intensively weathered heavy mineral zones with low Apatite-Tourmaline index (ATi) and GZi are evident in Miocene deposits encountered in offshore wells. These values may be used as a basis for correlation and could lead to development of a high-resolution stratigraphy leading to the possibility of carrying out real-time heavy mineral analysis during drilling.
This talk addresses the way that fundamental science interacts with the economic imperatives of the oil industry to the benefit of pure research and industrial innovation.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:
Professor David Macdonald holds the Established Chair in Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen. He graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BSc in geology with First Class Honours, and began work for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), as a contract geologist on South Georgia (Antarctica). At the same time, he was a member of Darwin College (University of Cambridge), where he obtained his PhD for sedimentological work on the Cumberland Bay Formation. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Keele University, he joined BP and worked as a sedimentologist in their International Division, undertaking field work in Sabah and Irian Jaya.
He rejoined BAS as Senior Sedimentologist and became leader of the Basin Dynamics Project, working mainly in Alexander Island, but also taking part in joint work with the US National Science Foundation in the Transantarctic Mountains. He was awarded a Polar Medal in l987.
In 1993 he became Director of the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme (an independent geological research group in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge). Their staff of 30 scientists and support staff conducted industrially sponsored geological research in frontier exploration areas: Arctic, Russian Far East, China, and the South Atlantic.
Since 1999, he has been Professor of Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen and was Head of School of Geosiences 2005-2010. His current research is on sand provenance, reservoir quality and tectonic controls on sedimentation (mainly based on Sakhalin and California). He has published more than 60 research papers and popular science articles, supervised 25 PhD students, and received about 1000 citations.
He is married, with two children, and is a Fellow of both the Geological Society (Chartered Geologist) and the Royal Geographical Society.

Prof. Panagiotis Karras
November 28, 2013
13.00 – 14.30
Beijing – 1 Auditorium, China cluster (Skolkovo School of Management)

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:
Today there is a strong interest in publishing data about individuals in a privacy-preserving manner. Data anonymization strives to (i) ensure that an adversary cannot identify an individual’s record from published attributes with high probability and, at the same time, and (ii) provide high data utility. These goals can be formulated as an optimization problem with privacy as the constraint and utility as the objective function. Conventional research, using the k-anonymity model, has resorted to publishing data in groups in which each individual record has its attribute values generalized so as to be indistinguishable from all other group members. A recently proposed alternative does not create such cliques; instead, it recasts data values in a heterogeneous manner, represented by a bipartite graph, aiming for higher utility. Nevertheless, such works either built roundabout solutions, introducing superfluities, or adopt a monolithic fixed-form solutionapplied to all data irrespective of their characteristics; thus, the utility gains they achieve are limited. In this talk I will propose a methodology that achieves the full potential of heterogeneity and gains higher data utility. We formulate the problem of maximal-utility k-anonymization as a network flow problem. We develop an optimal solution therefor using Mixed Integer Programming. Observing the non-scalability of this solution, we develop more efficient heuristic that solve the problem by building a set of k perfect matchings from original to anonymized data. Our techniques can resist adversaries who may know the employed algorithms, thanks to a randomization scheme. Our experiments with real-world data verify that our schemes achieve near-optimal utility, much higher than previous work, while they can exploit a parallel processing environment, gaining even an efficiency advantage over simpler methods. At the end of the talk, I will give an overview of other research activities and discuss the future directions of my research work.
SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:
Panagiotis Karras is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Teaching Excellence Fellow at Rutgers Business School. He was an LKY Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore from 2008 to 2011 and an Oberassistent at the University of Zurich from 2007 to 2008. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong in 2007 and an M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1999, while he has also worked and studied at the Technical University of Denmark and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Prof. Karras conducts research in the intersection of data management, data mining, and information security. His work has introduced algorithms and systems that allow for the satisfaction of efficiency, accuracy, privacy, integrity, and adaptability requirements in data representation and querying. He has developed methodsthat achieve optimal synopsis construction in low polynomial time, novel privacy models and algorithms for efficient data anonymization under those models, techniques for query authentication over data streams and query answering over encrypted data, robust and reliable adaptive indexing for modern main-memory column-stores, scalable similarity search over time series data bases, novel spatial join variants and techniques for in-memory spatial joins, and systems for scalable RDF data indexing. Last, he is working on parallel algorithms for graph management problems.
Prof. Karras has published over 35 research articles, advised 8 PhD students, and received over 700 citations. His research has been funded by the Lee Kuan Yew Endowment in Singapore.He received the 2008 Hong Kong Young Scientist Award in Physical/Mathematical Science. He is a member of ACM and IEEE, while he has served in the program committees of and refereed for major conferences and journals in the above areas.

Prof. Leonid Butov
November 29, 2013, Time slot: 13.00 – 14.30

Skolkovo School of Management – Beijing – 1 Auditorium, China cluster.
SEMINAR ABSTRACT:

An indirect exciton is a bound pair of an electron and a hole confined in spatially separated layers. Due to their long lifetimes, indirect excitons can cool down below the temperature of quantum degeneracy. This gives an opportunity to study cold exciton gases. We will present spontaneous coherence and condensation, spatial ordering, and spin currents in a cold excitons gas.
Indirect excitons are dipoles and their energy can be controlled by voltage. This gives an opportunity to build devices, which operate with excitons in place of electrons. We will present a proof of principle demonstration of excitonic circuit devices.
The energy control by voltage also gives an opportunity to create a variety of potential landscapes for indirect excitons and use them as a tool for studying basic properties of excitons. We will present spontaneous coherence and condensation of excitons in a trap.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:

• Since 2003 Professor, University of California San Diego, Department of Physics
• 2001 – 2003 Special Scientist, then Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
• 1997 Distinguished Visitor at the Center for Quantized Electronic Structures, UC Santa Barbara.
• 1992 – 1993 Karpinski Prize Fellow, Walter Schottky Institute, Garching.
• 1991 – 1992 & 1993 – 2000 Research Scientist, then Senior Research Scientist, then Leading Research Scientist, Doctor of Sciences, Institute of Solid State Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences.
• 1987 – 1991 Graduate Institution: Institute of Solid State Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences. Ph.D. 1991. Physics. Advisor: Vladimir Kulakovskii.
• 1981 – 1987 Undergraduate Institution: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Diploma 1987. Physics. Advisor: Vladimir Kulakovskii.

Dr. Alexander Ustinov
November 25, 2013. Time slot: 13.00 – 14.30
Skolkovo School of Management – Beijing – 1 Auditorium

SEMINAR ABSTRACT:

Boiling and condensation are two core processes in power generation and to enhance them numerous surfaces had been developed and extensively investigated over the last few decades. Application of surfaces with micropins, plasma-sputtered particles or ultra-thin coatings, developed by the author, can affect industries like power generation, cooling of electronics, refrigeration, heating and air-conditioning dramatically: their heat transfer rates were measured to be up to 18 times higher than for conventional surfaces.
Physics of boiling and condensation from novel surfaces reveals unexplored fundamental phenomena, like nucleation in a form of bubble chains, see Figure 1. This phenomenon along with interface oscillations of vapor bubbles and sono-luminescence will be discussed in presentation together with an innovative experimental method of simultaneous laser and acoustic diagnostics for multiphase systems complemented by theoretical analysis using the theory of chaos.

To increase efficiency of an energy system even more, one needs to utilize low potential heat sources. A combination of a heat storage and heat recovery system (like Organic Rankine Cycle installations) will be the next topic of the presentation. Several numerical (CFD) simulations and experimental investigations, performed by the author for European companies, will be demonstrated in presentation for processes in real-life industrial devices like wet scrubbers, catalysts, exhaust-gas-recirculation (EGR) coolers, thermal-electrical generators and heat accumulators. These technologies allow creation of a virtually fully autonomous energy system for a clean and efficient energy for tomorrow.

SPEAKER INTRODUCTION:
Dr. Alexander Ustinov is the owner and the CEO of Advanced Energy Technologies GmbH, a German-based company, providing R&D and engineering services, project management, process and product development for major German and international companies. Dr. Ustinov has earned 2 Ph.D. degrees: in 2005 from Moscow Power Engineering Institute (National Research University) and in 2008 with honors from University of Paderborn in Germany. Since 2002 he lives and works in Germany, where his career path has spread from a Ph.D. student through R&D engineer in automobile industry, an academic councilor at a university to the owner of his own company. He has co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed works and participated in the creation of several start-up companies, successfully bringing novel products and technologies to the European and international market.