Finding your passion is key to success, Brian Kobilka, MD, said in a speech June 15 at the School of Medicine commencement. In his usual self-deprecating manner, the Stanford scientist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year, minimized his credentials and credited support from others for much of his success. “I believe my career to date is an example of how a relatively average ...

Traditional compilers conduct optimizations on intermediate representations derived from high level source code. However, it is sometimes necessary and fruitful to optimize executables or compiled object files. This paper describes the Vizer system which automatically vectorizes object code for the Intel x86 architecture. Binary optimization offers the opportunity to improve performance in situ...

We develop an approach to utilize anisotropic metamaterials to solve one of the fundamental problems of modern plasmonics--parasitic scattering of surface waves into free-space modes, opening the road to truly two-dimensional plasmonic optics. We illustrate the developed formalism on the examples of plasmonic refractor and plasmonic crystal, and discuss limitations of the developed technique an...

Software engineering typically requires more effort in maintenance than in development time. As such, software engineering education needs to actively include software evolution. Teaching software evolution to undergraduate students usually includes the theoretical aspects, but doesn’t normally include the actual implementation. This paper describes the practice of teaching software evolution t...