Luis Rodriguez - Böcker

The biomass based energy sector, especially the one based on lignocellulosic sources such as switchgrass Miscanthus, forest residues and short rotation coppice, will play an important role in our drive towards renewable energy. The biomass feedstock production (BFP) subsystem provides the necessary material inputs to the conversion processes for energy production. This subsystem includes the agronomic production of energy crops and the physical handling and delivery of biomass, as well as other enabling logistics. Achieving a sustainable BFP system is therefore paramount for the success of the emerging bioenergy sector. However, low bulk and energy densities, seasonal and weather sensitive availability, distributed supply and lack of commercial scale production experience create unique challenges. Moreover, novel region specific feedstock alternatives continue to emerge. Engineering will play a critical role in addressing these challenges and ensuring the techno-economic feasibility of this sector. It must also integrate with the biological, physical and chemical sciences and incorporate externalities, such as social/economic considerations, environmental impact and policy/regulatory issues, to achieve a truly sustainable system. Tremendous progress has been made in the past few years while new challenges have simultaneously emerged that need further investigation. It is therefore prudent at this time to review the current status and capture the future challenges through a comprehensive book. This work will serve as an authoritative treatise on the topic that can help researchers, educators and students interested in the field of biomass feedstock production, with particular interest in the engineering aspects.​ ​

Every week at the Guild Complex--Chicago's internationally renowned cross-cultural literary center--poets open themselves up to the audience. Power Lines celebrates the first decade of the Guild Complex, its poets, and its publishing wing, Tia Chucha Press.

The Northeast San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles is the second largest community of Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States with 500,000 people. Yet, until 2001 the Northeast Valley had no trade bookstores, movie houses, art galleries, or decent cultural spaces. That year Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural opened its doors, first as a cultural café, which in ten years has provided workshops in music, visual arts, dance, theater, writing, and indigenous cosmology—along with an art gallery, a poetry press, a youth empowerment project, and the only annual outdoor literacy and performance festival in the area, “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung.”  Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams borrows its name from the name of one of its communities Pacoima, a Native American word meaning “rushing waters.” Interviews with artists, community leaders, poli­ticians, and well-known personalities essays, research, photos, art pieces, poetry, and cultural tableau, explore twenty years of how the lack of neighborhood cultural spaces adversely affects struggling fam­ilies and communities, and how the example of Tia Chucha’s inspires a cultural awakening and a revival of the economy and community spirit. The book speaks to a need for a national arts policy of cultural spaces, arts education, independent bookstores, public art projects, and more. Funded in part by the Los Angeles County Arts Commis­sion, the book includes a companion DVD by filmmaker John Cantu.

The second case, is the optimization of benchmark functions of the CEC 2015 Competition and we are also presenting results of the CEC 2017 Competition on Constrained Real-Parameter Optimization that are problems that contain the presence of constraints that alter the shape of the search space making them more difficult to solve.