EQN

This week’s business section of the Princeton Packet features an interesting cover story on the influential yet understated Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton.

“Less than a decade old, and despite its small size and low profile, the Bendheim Center has already established a global reputation in the highly technical, even arcane world, of financial economics research,” writes Packet business editor Lauren Otis.

Quite a few faculty members in Princeton’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering have close ties with the Bendheim Center. Among them is Rene Carmona, Paul Wythes Professor of Engineering and Finance and the Bendheim Center’s director of graduate studies.

Carmona tells the Packet that, although many other universities here and in Europe have tried to set up their own centers for financial research modeled after Princeton’s, the Bendheim Center remains unique. According to Carmona, this is both because the University prizes interdisciplinary research and because of Princeton’s relatively intimate scale.

The article offers other fascinating insights. For example, did you know that it was Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, former chairman of Princeton’s economics department, who hired Bendheim’s director, Yacine Ait-Sahalia?

Like the Bendheim Center, Princeton Engineering’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, known as ORFE, is young, unique and quietly influential. The first department of its kind, its province is engineering for business, commerce, and industry. For a sampling of themes in ORFE research, check out the papers presented in May at the 4th Oxford-Princeton Conference in Financial Mathematics, which include Jianqing Fan on option pricing, Birgit Rudloff on convex hedging, and Ronnie Sircar on credit derivatives.

“One reason for the success of this biannual workshop is that graduate students are important contributors,” Carmona tells EQN. The conference has been so successful that it has inspired several copycat collaborations between other universities.

While the powerful tools that Carmona and others at ORFE develop are highly sought after by Wall Street, these same tools can tackle problems in myriad other fields. Surely one of the more unusual senior theses that Carmona has supervised was that of Katherine Milkman, who subjected fiction published by The New Yorker magazine to rigorous mathematical analysis in 2004. The New York Times published an article about Milkman’s thesis, quoting legendary New Yorker writer Roger Angell as saying he was “personally riveted” by her project.

As part of Carmona’s current work on energy trading, he is analyzing the impact of the European Union “cap-and-trade” emission markets on electricity prices and on the global level of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. He recently gave talks at Stanford and Banff outlining his research into the design of carbon-credit markets, which are are bound to be part of the larger effort to head off climate change. (While we are on the subject of climate change, be sure to listen to Nell Boyce’s recent NPR feature on the carbon wedge game created by those gurus of global warming, Rob Socolow and Stephen Pacala).

You can find the Bendheim article in its entirety here. Also of interest: on this UCTV video podcast Carmona examines “the role played by mathematics in the ‘Wild Wild West’ of the pre-Enron collapse and the role that the mathematicians should play in the current search for sanity.”

Photo by Mark Czajkowski, courtesy Princeton Packet (Rene Carmona, left, with Yacine Ait-Sahalia).

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Computerworld magazine has just named Dan Wallach, who began his pathbreaking work in security research when he was a graduate student at Princeton, one of its “40 under 40” — an elite group of young innovators and leaders in information technology who “are building careers on their own terms, giving back in a big way and redefining what it means to be successful.”

Wallach is the “research guru who helped design the security architecture used for Java, JavaScript and C#,” Computerworld says in its citation. A professor at Rice University, Wallach is currently on sabbatical and concentrating on his research into voting security as associate director of ACCURATE, a center funded with $7.5 million from the National Science Foundation’s CyberTrust program.

“Dan has a lot of guts and is willing to do things that matter to people,” Ed Felten, who was Wallach’s adviser at Prince­ton, tells Computerworld. Many would say the same about Felten, who will be a speaker at the National Academy of Engineering’s 13th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering program. The September event will bring together topflight engineers between the ages of 30 and 45 who are “performing exceptional engineering research and technical work” in a cross-section of disciplines. Here is a recent story about Felten by Chris Newmarker of the Associated Press, which ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer among other places.

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Don’t miss this charming and informative discussion between Bloomberg’s Tom Keene and computer scientist Ken Steiglitz, who has just written a book on auction theory and eBay, which he calls a “a beautifully tuned mechanism.” Steiglitz offers a couple of fun revelations about his own eBay transactions, including how he made a small fortune selling an old Princeton yearbook and the fact that he was late to a dinner in honor of eBay CEO Meg Whitman because he was busy attempting a last-minute auction coup.

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For a rare window into the white-knuckle world of starting up a new company, check out this indepth profile of Princeton Power, a young company that may well evolve into one of the major energy players of the 21st century.

The piece tells the story of how four recent Princeton Engineering undergraduates — Darren Hammell, Mark Holveck, Erik Limpaecher, and John Lerch — formed the company, which is commercializing new technology for making solar and wind power more efficient.

Among the more amazing revelations: When entrepreneur Greg Olsen committed to seed the young company with $500,000, he did so with a message scribbled on a yellow Post-It note.

Inevitably, the article mentions Ed Zschau, whose class in “high-tech entrepreneurship” has legendarily inspired legions of entrepreneurially minded Princeton undergraduates.

Holveck tells Alan S. Brown, associate editor of Mechanical Engineering magazine, that he chose to attend Princeton because undergraduates receive a lot of one-on-one attention from professors and because its engineering program is an integral part of a world-class university.

“I saw people from more narrowly focused engineering programs and they became pigeonholed,” he says. “I didn’t want to be the guy in cubicle 26 calculating thermal engine blocks; I just wanted to learn and become great.”

Last year Princeton Power received a grant of $529,626 from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology for a collaboration with Princeton Engineering professors Clarence Rowley and Sanjeev Kulkarni. To get a better idea of the breadth at Princeton that Holveck alludes to, see this interview with Kulkarni on his new book with philosopher Gil Harman.

Photo: John Jameson

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Puerto Rico has one of the highest asthma rates in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A common source of lung irritation? Pollution from diesel emissions.

This is why Nesmarie Negron, an environmental engineer based in the Environmental Protection Agency’s New York City office, recently spent several months in Puerto Rico, encouraging private and public stakeholders to participate in EPA’s National Clean Diesel Campaign. The goal is to significantly reduce diesel emissions by using cleaner fuels, retrofitting and repairing existing fleets, and reducing the amount of time that engines idle.

While she was in her native Puerto Rico, Negron — who graduated from Princeton in 2002 with a degree in chemical engineering — also helped develop another EPA program, Clean School Bus USA, whose goal is to reduce emissions from buses. She coordinated Puerto Rico’s first retrofitting of a school bus with a diesel oxidation catalyst. The retrofit is expected to cut the bus’s particulate emissions by 20 percent, hydrocarbons by 50 percent, and carbon monoxide by at least 60 percent.

WAPA Noticentro 4 interviewed Negron about her work while she was in Puerto Rico.

By the way, Negron did her senior thesis on diesel engines at Princeton under the guidance of fuel-cell innovator Jay Benzinger, whom many alumni place in Princeton’s pantheon of great teachers.

Photo, courtesy EPA: Nesmarie Negron is interviewed by Lesley Cruz of Puerto Rico’s WAPA Noticentro 4.

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Tonight’s broadcast of the PBS science show NOVA will feature Arlie Petters, who attended Princeton as a graduate student and who is now a professor at Duke whose current research is on the cutting edge of mathematical physics.

Petters tells NOVA how his personal journey shaped his professional research:

“When I first came to the U.S., I had this thick Belizean accent,” he says. “I felt I belonged in a community of African-Americans; I had many friends and so on. At the same time, everyone kept teasing me: ‘You speak in such a strange way.’ So as an immigrant, I felt a little like I was in this no-man’s-land. And if you look at my work, I touch on pure math, I touch on astrophysics. I’m even doing mathematical finance, right? I do quite a mixture of things. I think of myself, deep in my heart, as a citizen of the world. When you feel you’re in no-man’s-land, well, you can view it that way, or you can view the glass as half full in that I engage in all these different cultures and a little bit of each comes into me.”

In the NOVA interview, Petters also offers a beautifully metaphorical explanation of how gravity bends light and talks about the Petters Institute in Dangriga, Belize, whose goal is to nurture young Belizeans interested in pursuing math and science.

This fall Petters will be a guest professor in Princeton’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, home to one of his mentors, William Massey.

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As part of an hourlong feature on wired art, New Jersey Public Television’s State of the Arts will be broadcasting a piece tonight produced by Eric Schultz on the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, otherwise known as PLOrk.

The piece was actually recorded last year, shortly after PLOrk gave its world premiere performance, to much acclaim. So what have PLOrk cofounders Perry Cook and Dan Trueman been up to in the meantime?

Cook is making music with a lithophone originally created with sculptor Jonathan Shor for Quark Park. Drawing upon his digital music expertise, he also is researching an inexpensive way to screen patients for the risk of having a stroke and developing technologies to help those who suffer from aphasia.

Trueman has spent the last year as a Guggenheim fellow in part working on his Cyclotron, which he describes as a “tool for tweaking time” and “a visual interface for experimenting with rhythmic cycles.” Trueman invented his Cyclotron more than a decade ago. But during his sabbatical he decided to figure how to hook it up to ChucK, a new music programming language written by Ge Wang, who just finished his Ph.D. under Cook’s supervision and in the fall will join the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics as an assistant professor.

Last year Wang got high praise for ChucK from Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka (aka Cory Linden), who wrote in his blog that that he was blown away by ChucK when he came to Princeton to talk at the invitation of Ed Felten about Linden Lab’s 3-D virtual world Second Life.

By the way, the Educational Technologies Center at Princeton is building a campus on Second Life. Blogger Aleister Kronos — who recently got a sneak preview and tour from Princeton’s charming virtual tourguide, Persis Trilling — describes it on 3pointD, where you can take a peak at Nassau Hall’s virtual doppelganger. Just below is the Second Life version of Princeton’s Chancellor Green, where PLOrk gave a fabulous in-the-round performance last May. Surely PLOrk will be headlining on Princeton’s Second Life campus sometime soon.

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Cyclingupdate.com features a profile of Princeton undergraduate Nick Frey, who recently won the 2007 U.S. Espoir National Time Trial. Logging 25 hours a week in training surely contributed to Frey’s victory. But the article also details how Frey — who majors in mechanical and aerospace engineering — uses his knowledge of aerodynamics to his advantage.

Clearly, Frey is not the only engineer whose expertise gives him a sporting edge. Kyle Vanderlick is chairman of the chemical engineering department at Princeton and one of the world’s foremost experts on atomic-scale interactions that govern friction and adhesion between two surfaces. She is also a bowling champ. Read more to find out how her research informs her bowling.

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Global warming gurus and Princeton professors Rob Socolow and Stephen Pacala are often in the news but this month they seem to be more in the news than usual.

In the July 13 issue of the journal Science, Rep. Rush Holt D-N.J. writes an essay on Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth and the movie of the same name. Holt, a Ph.D. physicist (one of the few scientists in Congress) says he finds Gore’s science solid, noting Gore’s endorsement of the “wedge model” of carbon reduction propounded by Socolow and Pacala.

Steven Mufson, writing in the Washington Post, describes the Socolow-Pacala wedge solution in great detail. “The impact of the wedges has been huge,” writes Mufson. Since the duo introduced the concept in 2004, he notes, each has “given about 100 talks, prodding scientists, policymakers and companies to attack global warming in concrete ways.”

The problem of climate change is daunting, Mufson acknowledges. But, Socolow tells him, “We’ve gone from a problem people scarcely recognized, to one that seemed impossible to address, to a serious determination to address it.”

Socolow also appears in a blog post by Andrew Revkin in New York Times this month, offering less sanguine words about whether solar panels might contribute much to the wedge approach in the near-term.

While Socolow and Pacala’s fan club grows larger by the minute, they have their critics. Among them is Warren Meyer, a small-business owner in Phoenix, Arizona, who received his undergraduate degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton in 1984. Earlier this month Meyer posted on his contrarian Coyote blog a draft of his book A Layman’s Guide to Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming.

“Despite good evidence that global temperatures are rising and that CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and help to warm the Earth,” writes Meyer, “we are a long way from attributing all or much of current warming to man-made CO2. We are even further away from being able to accurately project man’s impact on future climate.”

In other news, Rep. Holt (who wrote the Science essay mentioned above) has given no indication that he plans to leave his House seat in order to run for the Senate. Even so, PoliticsNJ.com is running a poll to see who would be likely to win the Democratic nomination for his House seat in such a scenario. The front runner? Juan Melli, a Princeton graduate student in mechanical and aerospace and founder of the liberal Blue Jersey blog, which has quickly become a must-read in New Jersey politics.

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