News

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.

In August, WNCG Professor Francois Baccelli co-organized a workshop at the Issac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge (UK) with Venkat Anantharam (Berkeley), Sergey Foss (Heriot-Watt) and Peter Glynn (Stanford). The workshop was titled Stochastic Processes and Communication Science. The workshop was focused on probabilistic techniques for the analysis of networks, with central applications in communications, social networks and energy systems. The meeting concentrated around three major mathematical themes: stochastic networks, big data analysis, spatial stochastic models.