People, papers and presentations

Don H. Johnson, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of statistics, is one of the experts who will share new insights into the art of Rene Magritte at “Magritte: Beyond the Image, Beneath the Paint.” The full-day symposium will be held from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. March 1 at the Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theatre of the Asia Society Texas Center, 1370 Southmore Blvd, Houston. No reservations are needed to attend this free event. For more information, call 713-525-9400 or visit www.menil.org.

Antonios Mikos, the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice, was honored with a Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award by Purdue University Feb. 21. Mikos, a pioneer in tissue engineering based at the BioScience Research Collaborative, earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering at Purdue in 1985 and a doctorate there in 1988. Read more about Mikos’ award here.

A four-student team of engineering undergraduates won a Google Prize at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennApps hackathon Feb. 16. The event, in which teams collaborate intensively to produce a software project in 48 hours, is one of the nation’s largest student hackathons. Rice’s team included Brown College seniors Sal Testa and Waseem Ahmad, Duncan College junior Matthew Schurr and Lovett College junior Lily Wen. The team created a presentation app for Google Glass and Presentations called “Telepromptu,” which does away with handheld remotes and uses voice recognition to automatically advance both PowerPoint slides and teleprompters.