Inspired by the success of the new graduate/undergraduate credited seminars at UC Davis (https://expolab.org/) centering on stress reduction, Mohammad Sadoghi (UC Davis) along with Dr. Lynn Wilcox (Professor Emeritus at CSU, Sacramento, Counseling/Psychology Department) and Dr. Nasim Bahadorani (MBS, DrPH, CHES) will be offering an hour introductory experiential workshop in stress management. Overcoming stress is crucial in paving the way to promote a healthier lifestyle filled with joy & creativity. This experiential seminar presents a comprehensive stress management technique that revolves around unique heart-centered meditation practice, namely, Tamarkoz®. Tamarkoz® practices employ the art of self-knowledge through concentration and meditation. Learning meditation is like learning how to swim. You cannot do it by reading a book. You have to get in the water and practice. True learning requires systematic training. This workshop will provide a "taste", it teaches how to attain the relaxation necessary for reaching the real state of concentration and meditation.

The beneficial effects of meditation are well documented in a massive amount of research literature. Participants report many positive results, with particular emphasis on stress reduction. People who meditate properly are calmer, less tense, less reactive to stress, healthier, feel better, have greater self-esteem, and above all are more creative and joyful than those who do not. Meditators also report a sense of increased well-being and enjoyment of life. Research has clearly demonstrated that meditation is helpful in several stress-related conditions such as high blood pressure, headaches, back problems, cardiac rehabilitation and pain reduction. Recent research indicates it is often more effective than psychotherapy in the treatment of some problems. The exercises included in the workshop can be of immediate practical value, and participants usually enjoy doing them. Generally, the aim of the workshop (when offered as a quarter-long course) is to provide: (1) A foundation and working knowledge of basic theories of meditation; (2) The opportunity to participate as an ongoing member of a meditation group; (3) Working knowledge of meditative techniques; (4) An understanding of meditative principles; (5) The ability to practice deep breathing; (6) The ability to perform stretching and energy balancing exercises; (7) Working knowledge of stress reduction techniques; (8) Knowledge of the various types of meditative approaches and relevant therapeutic factors; (9) A safe environment, in which participants feel free to examine and change behavioral habits; and (10) The capacity to sit still and silent for 30 minutes.

Abstract: A PhD is supposed to prepare you to conduct independent research. This is a bit different from being a professor. In this talk, I’ll share my (limited) experience on trying to build a successful academic career (whatever that means…). By attending it you might (or might not) learn (1) what are the characteristics of a successful paper, (2) how to create a company based on your research, (3) how to spend a crazy amount of resources in something no one cares about (until they do), (4) how to change the focus of your research to a new hot topic and get dragged back, and (5) how to say no.

Biography: Alysson Bessani is an Associate Professor of the University of Lisbon Faculty of Sciences, Portugal, and a member of LASIGE research unit. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UFSC (Brazil) in 2006, was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2010) and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (2014). Alysson coordinated/collaborated in ten international projects and co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications on dependability, security, Byzantine fault tolerance, and cloud storage. He is also the principal researcher behind the BFT-SMaRt consensus library (http://bft-smart.github.io/library/) and a co-founder of the Vawlt dependable & secure cloud storage startup (https://vawlt.io). More information about him can be found in http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~bessani/.

Abstract: The tech industry seems to be siphoning the majority of PhD talent into "one-size-fits-all" software engineering roles. Despite the Silicon Valley allure of huge stock packages and office perks rivaling those of 4-star resorts, a PhD is not "one-size-fits-all" and neither are your post-graduation plans. In this talk, I'll recount my end-of-PhD experience last year with applying to, interviewing for, and ultimately accepting a new job as I transitioned from academia to a small industry research team. My hope is that sharing my experiences may help you in choosing the best path for you personally and making the difficult decision between alternatives such as academia vs. industry, startup vs. Big 4, and "relevant to my thesis" vs. "I have no idea what this tech is, but I'm confident I'll figure it out". I'll break down the messy process of finding the right competitive offers and then deciding between them into a personalized fuzzy approach at approaching the problem critically (like any PhD should).

Biography: Kyle Benson received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine in late 2018 and joined RTI as a Research Engineer in early 2019. His dissertation, entitled "Resilient Communications Middleware for IoT Data Exchange", explored the use of edge computing and SDN to improve communications between constrained devices during challenging scenarios such as network disruptions. His current areas of research at RTI include fail-over of VM/container-based microservices, enabling resilient AI workflows in challenging edge computing environments, and supporting high-performance data exchange for modeling and simulation environments built in 3D gaming engines.

Abstract: Are you building a mission-critical distributed IoT application? A new pub/sub system for your research but dreading all the manual systems programming issues you'll encounter when building out the data plane? Or perhaps you want to implement and test your newly-proposed feature/algorithm within a real-world connectivity middleware? Then please join us at this tutorial that will introduce you to the Data Distribution Service (DDS) and RTI's industry-leading implementation. We'll discuss the features of the open DDS standard that led to it being trusted by mission-critical industries from healthcare to robotics (DDS is the communication layer of ROS2) to aerospace & defense. We'll also share our perspective on cutting edge research being conducted in IoT connectivity middleware, possible thesis topics for those interested in this area, and possible avenues of collaboration with the RTI research team. We are proud to offer our scalable, ruggedized, resilient, highly-performant, data-centric middleware to the academic research/education community FREE of charge! See www.rti.com/events/mw2019 for more details.

Biography: Kyle Benson received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine in late 2018 and joined RTI as a Research Engineer in early 2019. His dissertation, entitled "Resilient Communications Middleware for IoT Data Exchange", explored the use of edge computing and SDN to improve communications between constrained devices during challenging scenarios such as network disruptions. His current areas of research at RTI include fail-over of VM/container-based microservices, enabling resilient AI workflows in challenging edge computing environments, and supporting high-performance data exchange for modeling and simulation environments built in 3D gaming engines.