introductions

I spent a great lunch and early afternoon with Maurizio Porfiri (NYU Poly), who is a mechanical engineer and applied mathematician working on dynamical networks of independent agents like fish. He has some sweet experiments in which his lab watches fish schooling, works out the schooling rules, and then inserts a robotic fish and uses the robotic fish to take control of the school and drive it around! I discussed with him the possible relevance of his work to our ideas about building a collaboration between NYU, NYU Poly, NYU Abu Dhabi, and NYU Global that will create and run a global network of autonomous telescopes.

In the late afternoon, a group of high school students came from NEST high school in Manhattan to NYU to present original research they have done with the Spitzer Space Telescope on the AGN NGC 4051. They got time from the director's discretionary time and they have done a huge amount of work with the data and come to some interesting conclusions about the structure of the dust torus. Nice work!