Category: Presentations and Talks

Join the Ulrich Museum of Art for a talk, “Social Justice in Our Community,” from Marquette Atkins-Woods at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 5 in the Beren Gallery of the Ulrich Museum. A reception starts at 5:30 p.m.

Atkins-Woods, founder and executive director of Destination Innovation Inc., is a community educator who brings her passion for working with youth and her creative energy to the table as a facilitator. In 2015, she founded Camp Destination Innovation to expose young people to a variety of career options, encouraging them to create their own future.

The talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Lesley Dill | Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, on display in the Polk/Wilson Gallery Aug. 5 through Dec. 2.

The Department of Women’s, Ethnicity, and Intersectionality Studies (WEIS) and the Department of History invite the campus community to Words By Women’s 2023 lecture.

Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, a historian of Black women in the United States, will give a lecture, “Julia Chinn: A Story of Sex, Slavery, and Survival in the Old South” at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 7 in 200 Ahlberg Hall.

The lecture is open to students, faculty, staff and members of the Wichita community at no additional charge. The lecture is based on her forthcoming book, “The Vice-President’s Black Wife: The Untold Story of Julia Chinn.” Chinn, whose story is mostly unknown, was the Black wife of the ninth vice president of the United States and serves as an example of the intersectionality of race and gender in the 19th century United States.

The Department of Biological Sciences’ fall 2023 seminar series begins Monday, Aug. 28, with its newest staff member Evalynn Trumbo with her talk, “Migrating from the Ozarks to the Plains: Birds, bats and bugs.”

The seminar is held from 4 to 5 p.m. in 218 Hubbard Hall. Seminars are open to the public and undergraduates are encouraged to attend.

The Department of Mechanical Engineering within the College of Engineering is hosting Dr. Yun Hang Hu, the Charles and Carroll McArthur Endowed Chair Professor from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Michigan Technological University.

Hu will present “Advanced Materials for Sustainable Energy and Environment” to students, staff, faculty and industry partners from 3 to 4 p.m. Friday, Aug. 25 in 211 Engineering Building.

The Barton School of Business has announced Curt Coffman as its fall 2023 Executive-in-Residence. Coffman is the founder of The Coffman Organization and co-author of New York Times bestsellers, “First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently” and “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch.”

As Executive-in-Residence, Coffman will provide mentorship opportunities to students, exchange ideas with Barton School faculty and staff, and host a conversation with industry leaders. The theme of his residency and title of his keynote presentation is “The Power of You: New Formula for Growth.” Following the keynote, Coffman will distribute and sign two of his books to those in attendance.

RSVP for the keynote, 9:30-10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 13 in Woolsey Hall, at no additional charge.

Join the Ulrich Museum of Art for a talk from Dr. Ajita Rattani, “Deepfake Detection: Challenges and Future Research Directions,” starting at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 13 in the Beren Gallery at the Ulrich and via livestream. Attendees are also invited to a reception at 5:30 p.m.

Rattani is the director of WSU’s Visual Computing and Biometric Security Lab. She will discuss the use of deep fakes to commit fraud, falsify evidence, manipulate public debates and destabilize political processes and the attempts to mitigate the risk.

The talk is part of the larger exhibition, In Event of Moon Disaster, a multi-media project created by directors Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta to illustrate the possibilities of deepfake technologies. They also offer a variety of resources to help the public understand and recognize the technologies involved.

The public events accompanying the exhibition are supported by the College of Engineering, Fairmount College, National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) and the Barton School.

The Ulrich Museum will host the talk, “Susan Copich’s Mediated Femininities: One Body, Many Stories,” with artist Susan Copich at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 29 in the Polk/Wilson Gallery in the Ulrich, with a Q&A segment following the talk. A reception will be held starting at 5:30 p.m.

Susan will choose a selection of her images and explore the underlying intentions behind each photograph. She will delve into the technical, metaphorical and psychological layers that make up each image and share her inspirations for each of her series and the creative decisions she made during the process. Additionally, she will touch on the subconscious overarching themes that reveal themselves over time and through perspective.

Dr. Omar Sediek will speak as part of the Disaster Resilience Analytics Center (DRAC) seminar series from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, June 22 via Zoom.

His talk will discuss the necessity of distributed computing for conducting cross-disciplinary research where field-specific computational models (simulators) are available, but have not been designed to work together. An example of this is natural hazards research. Simulators abound in the disparate fields that fall under this area (e.g. social science, engineering, economics and health), but little progress has been made to integrate the simulators to study overarching and cross-disciplinary disaster scenarios. The reason for slow penetration of this technology is the high barrier to entry, which requires extensive knowledge of computer science and programming. The talk will focus on a platform named Simple Run Time Infrastructure (SRTI) that address the issues mentioned above. Designed to provide a low barrier to use, SRTI v2 is developed for users with limited programming experience and designed to simplify and streamline a user’s effort to compose a distributed simulation and handle time management.

Dr. Sediek is a bridge engineer at Alfred Benesch & Company. He received his joint Ph.D. in civil engineering and scientific computing from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with specialization in seismic resilience of communities. He received his bachelor’s and master’s from Cairo University in Egypt. His research interests span from the stability of steel members to community resilience against natural hazards and the use of artificial intelligence in structural engineering.

Jan Dirk Roggenkamp, professor of public law at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, will present “The German Model of Police Education” at 3:30 p.m., Thursday, June 22, in 265 Rhatigan Student Center. A reception will follow.

Roggenkamp researches IT law, in particular the legal implications of police work and information technology (e.g., data retention, monitoring and surveillance of IT, use of social networks, data protection and privacy). He has published numerous articles in German law journals. He is also the author/editor of legal commentaries on data protection law, internet law, police law and association law.

Join the Ulrich Museum of Art for a talk from Joshua Saxe, “The Promise and Peril of Intelligent, Creative Machines,” starting at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 15 in the Beren Gallery at the Ulrich and via livestream. Attendees are also invited to a reception at 5:30 p.m.

Saxe is a Wichita-based computer scientist and a senior staff AI scientist at Meta, where he helps lead the design and implementation of trust and safety measures using generative AI. Prior to working at Meta, he was chief scientist at Sophos and principal investigator on multiple DARPA-funded cybersecurity AI research programs.

The talk is part of the larger exhibition, In Event of Moon Disaster, a multi-media project created by directors Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta to illustrate the possibilities of deepfake technologies. They also offer a variety of resources to help the public understand and recognize the technologies involved.

The public events accompanying the exhibition are supported by the College of Engineering, Fairmount College, National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) and the Barton School.