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School of City and Regional Planning Assistant Professor Rounaq Basu knows it, too. So he and his students (supported by the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics) created the Cool Routes app to help people in Atlanta find the most shaded — and most importantly, the coolest — paths if they have to walk or bike outside.

Describing Atlanta’s latest heatwave, “This is great for research, but not so great for residents,” Basu said. “I like to walk and bike everywhere, and it’s too hot. I need to know where the shaded paths are!”

The Cool Routes app currently covers 10 cities in the U.S., including Atlanta. Users choose a city from a dropdown menu, provide a trip start and destination, tell the app whether they’re walking or biking, and select route preferences. The app then generates up to three routes to the user’s destination, allowing them to compare how much cooler one route is from another. Further refinement of routes is offered after that.

Learn more >>

Superfund sites are highly contaminated areas designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for hazardous waste cleanup. Superfund Research Centers are coordinated research programs — not physical buildings — designed to address complex environmental health problems, reduce exposure to contaminants, and improve public health. Fewer than 24 exist nationwide.

A Community Asking Questions for Decades

For generations, residents of the city of Brunswick and Glynn County have lived near former industrial facilities that produced or used chemicals such as toxaphene, PCBs, and mercury. Many have long suspected that these contaminants were affecting their health, yet lacked scientific evidence to validate their concerns.

That began to change in 2023, when Emory University researchers launched the Glynn County human exposure study at the invitation of residents. The study found elevated levels of legacy pollutants in the blood of many participants, confirming what community members had feared.

“I want more neighbors to have the opportunity to be tested and to learn about the project,” said resident Semona Holmes. “Because now more folks are saying, ‘I want to be tested.’”

Others on the coast echoed the need for continued investigation. “Exposure isn’t always uniform,” said Brunswick resident Michael Staley. “Some residents may have higher levels depending on their proximity, diet, or occupation. I hope this gives our neighbors a clearer understanding of how our communities are affected, because often regular people feel uncertain and overlooked.”

Residents have repeatedly asked for more testing, more transparency, and more opportunities to understand what is in their soil, water, and bodies. “I would like to see an expansion of the exposure study because the soil needs to be tested,” said Larry Owens, who lives near the Hercules-Pinova site, a former chemical plant that closed in 2023.

Another resident, John Freeman, emphasized the need for broad participation. “They need to make sure everybody in our neighborhood knows they are going to be doing research so that everybody will have the chance to come out and get tested and see what’s in their bodies.”

Building on Community Momentum

The new Superfund Research Center will expand this work significantly. Led by Emory University in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Georgia, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Texas Tech University, the center will focus on five major research areas:

• Human health research — evaluating links between chemical exposures and metabolic diseases.
• Toxicity testing — assessing how contaminants harm health.
• Environmental sampling — identifying soil, water, and other exposure pathways.
• Extreme weather modeling — studying how storms and flooding move hazardous chemicals.
• Remediation research — evaluating low‑impact cleanup strategies suitable for sensitive coastal ecosystems.

“By combining cutting-edge exposure science and health research with direct community partnerships, the center will translate complex environmental data into practical information that supports healthier decisions for families, clinicians, and policymakers,” says Dana Barr, professor of environmental health at Emory University and director of the Superfund Research Center.

Barr credited community leadership for the center's existence. “This project is a direct consequence of community support in many forms. We would not be here without your efforts, and we know what that means: We must keep community voices at the forefront of our work, and we need to deliver.”

Community Voices at the Heart of the Work

Residents say the exposure study empowered them to speak up and demand answers.

“After I learned my numbers showed contamination, I started coming to the community meetings,” said Jocelyn Farmer, a fenceline resident. “I wanted to learn more about the study and about my neighborhood.”

Another resident, Eugene Smiley, said that “everyone who lives in this neighborhood should have their blood tested. Yes, I think they should come back and give people a chance to get tested so that we all are aware of what chemicals are in our bodies.”

For many in this coastal Georgia area, the new center represents long-awaited recognition.

“We’ve been living here a long time, and we’ve been exposed to it,” said Victoria Mackey. “If this study had not happened, we would not have known. Now we have chemical awareness. There are generations that have been exposed to these chemicals. The expanded exposure study is needed.”

Community partners also see the center as a turning point.

The research involves working with Healthy Coastal Neighborhoods, a community-driven coalition working at the intersection of environmental quality and public health in Glynn County, Georgia. The coalition brings together community groups, researchers, and residents to address the toxic legacy that has affected coastal Georgia communities for decades. The coalition issued a local news release announcing the new research center on June 10.

“We are honored and truly humbled to be partners in this project,” said Jill Gambill, executive director of the CEAR Hub and senior research associate for the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech-Savannah. “The residents of Glynn County have been asking hard questions about their health and environment for a long time. This center is our opportunity to put Georgia Tech's resources and expertise to work directly for the community.”

Investing in Education, Engagement, and Local Capacity

Funded at approximately $15 million over five years, the center will also support:

• Community engagement programs.
• Youth educational outreach.
• Improvements to the Healthy Coastal Neighborhoods’ Seafood Smart website.
• A community advisory group.
• Training for local healthcare providers.

“The issue of industrial contamination is inherently complex, and this Superfund Research Center offers a rare opportunity to address it from multiple angles,” says Noah Scovronick, deputy director of the center. “Just as important, the center supports community-led efforts to raise awareness and reduce exposures.”

A Model for the Nation

Although the center’s work is focused on Glynn County, its findings will have national relevance. Communities across the country face similar challenges with legacy pollutants, and the center’s research aims to provide actionable insights for reducing exposure and improving public health.

“Even after production stops, these chemicals can continue entering people’s bodies through lingering exposure pathways,” says Melanie Pearson, associate professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. “Understanding how that happens is essential to reducing risk. Partnering with affected residents strengthens the science and ensures it leads to meaningful, real-world benefits.”

Candidates for the fifth annual CoE Faculty Excellence Awards were nominated by their peers or submitted self-nominations. Materials were reviewed by a committee of academic and research faculty members within the College.

Two of these faculty award winners, Hong Yeo and Omar Inan, are members of the Institute for People and Technology. Read the full CoE article >>

Georgia has become the world’s second-largest data center market, a shift that has brought economic opportunity as well as concerns about water use, energy demand, land development, and impacts on host communities. One recurring theme throughout the event was the tendency for environmental and resource issues to overshadow other important policy questions about community impact, transparency, and long-term governan

Introductory remarks were made by Beril Toktay, executive director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, and Michael Best, executive director of the  Institute for People and Technology.

Verghese Jacob, senior vice president of technology at the DayOne corporation, delivered the keynote address. Jacob discussed how DayOne works with governments in Asia to plan data centers and said early policy development and consistent communication can help communities better understand the impact and manage growth for long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships between governments and communities.

The event also included a BBISS Connect Workshop, led by Kristin Janacek, a senior extension professional with BBISS. The workshop built on BBISS’s Sustainability for Data Centers Insights Series and asked participants to contribute to a collaborative “blue paper” intended to guide future research partnerships and responses to funding opportunities.

Two panel discussions explored the social and political dimensions of data center development. The first, moderated by Cindy Lin, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing, focused on international perspectives. Panelists included Celine Benoit of the Atlanta Regional Commission, Matthew Wesley Williams of Groundswell, Kahlil Bostick of Ryan Companies, and Ding Wang of Google Research. They discussed global examples of community-centered planning and the need for transparency in negotiations.

A second panel, moderated by Allen Hyde, an associate professor in the School of History and Sociology, examined collaboration between communities and government agencies. Panelists were Georgia Public Service Commissioner Peter Hubbard; Donnie Beamer, senior technology advisor for the City of Atlanta; Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Zachary Hansen; and Michael Czajkowski, director of advocacy for Science for Georgia. The group highlighted the importance of proactive regulation and clear communication with residents as data center development accelerates.

Speakers throughout the day emphasized that Atlanta’s continued growth in the data center sector will require coordinated planning and meaningful engagement with affected communities. The event closed with a call for all stakeholders to be proactive about creating policies that balance the technological and economic promise of the data center building boom with environmental and community concerns.

Kala Jordan has been promoted to Research Scientist II. With a background spanning biology, health informatics, and STEM education, Jordan brings a multidisciplinary approach to her work. She plays a key role in AI‑CARING, leading studies that support the development of personalized collaborative AI systems designed to improve quality of life for older adults.

Noah Posner has been promoted to Senior Research Scientist. As manager of the Interactive Product Design Lab, Posner focuses on interactive experiences grounded in physical interaction. His research spans CAD‑based prototyping, rapid fabrication, and STEAM education, and he teaches courses in physical prototyping and industrial design.

Peter Presti has been promoted to Principal Research Scientist. Over his 22‑year career at Georgia Tech, Presti has collaborated with major industry partners and federal agencies. His research spans sensor systems, biometrics, wearable computing, signal processing, embedded systems, and integrated hardware‑software prototyping.

Richard Starr has been promoted to Senior Research Scientist. Starr oversees the IPaT Secure Data Enclave, developing and managing the institute’s secure infrastructure for healthcare data. His work ensures campus‑wide compliance with HIPAA, IRB requirements, and partnership agreements.

Andrew Zhao has been promoted to Research Scientist II. Zhao, a Georgia Tech alumnus with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science, specializes in social computing. His work examines how social media facilitates information flow and connection, particularly around mental health and elections. He supports the CANDOR Portal and AI‑CARING projects, contributing full‑stack development, data pipelines, LLM fine‑tuning, and infrastructure management.

“These promotions are wonderful and well deserved. Hearty congratulations to Andrew, Kala, Richard, Noah, and Peter!” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT.

“These promotions are a testament to the outstanding capabilities and contributions of IPaT’s research faculty community,” added Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research for IPaT.

A Career Built on Service and Adaptability

Hanson’s journey in higher education began immediately after high school when she joined Purdue University and discovered her passion for supporting students, faculty, and academic communities. She carried that passion across multiple institutions before landing at Tech, building a career grounded in adaptability, resilience, and people-centered service.

Her Georgia Tech chapter began in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), where she supported the Water Resources Engineering group. There, she became a trusted resource for students and faculty alike — a steady presence who celebrated their successes, listened during challenges, and helped build a sense of community. 

Hanson credits Lisa Tuttle in CEE with helping her navigate the Georgia Tech landscape. With Tuttle’s help, she also discovered a talent for event planning and administrative leadership, eventually serving as administration manager and supporting the CEE chair with meetings, alumni engagement, and major departmental initiatives. One of her most memorable experiences was coordinating a trip to NATO headquarters in Belgium, an opportunity that deepened her appreciation for global collaboration and institutional history.

“Crystal was an extraordinary contributor throughout her time in CEE, first in the Water Resources Engineering group and later as the trusted manager of the entire administrative support team,” said Donald Webster, Karen and John Huff School Chair in CEE. “In every role, she brought dedication, professionalism, and genuine care for others. Crystal consistently went above and beyond to support the people of CEE — not only through professional challenges, but also during moments of personal crisis — always with compassion, steadiness, and grace. Her presence made our community stronger, more resilient, and more humane.”

A Trusted Partner in Research Leadership

Hanson later transitioned to the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) office, where she worked under leaders including Stephen Cross, Christopher Jones, Giselle Bennett, Raheem Beyah, and Julia Kubanek. Her time in this environment was formative. She absorbed the complexities of research administration, budgeting, and strategic planning, all while contributing to a culture where staff felt valued and included.

“When I joined the EVPR office, and it had only three or four people, it seemed everyone was doing two or three jobs,” said Christopher Jones, who joined the office in 2013 and is now the John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “Crystal was an immediate fit, bringing with her organizational and management skills, a sense of humor, and an appreciation of our mission.  She is someone whom I always look forward to seeing, both then and now.”

After Beyah left the EVPR office to become the dean and Southern Company Chair in the College of Engineering, Kubanek became the new vice president for Interdisciplinary Research (VPIR). Together, Kubanek and Hanson built and expanded the VPIR team, helping to shape its operations and identity.

Among her many contributions, Hanson initiated the Interdisciplinary Research Spotlight Awards, recognizing staff and research faculty who go above and beyond in the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRIs). She also shepherded the Research Faculty Teaching Fellows program, ensuring that research faculty across Georgia Tech and the Georgia Tech Research Institute had opportunities to develop teaching skills in partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning.

The Connector at the Heart of the VPIR Office

Crystal describes herself as someone who prefers to work behind the scenes: cleaning up after events, coordinating logistics, and taking on nearly any task that needs to be done. 

“Crystal is the ultimate behind-the-scenes master organizer and people connector,” said Kubanek. “She develops individual relationships that enable her to organize, in short order, a meeting of numerous campus leaders whose calendars should be impossible to align. She comes bearing snacks and a smile and is the heart of our operation.”

Hanson’s deep institutional knowledge and extensive network positioned her to navigate Georgia Tech’s complex landscape. She serves as a bridge between the VPIR office, the IRIs, GTRI, and campus partners, ensuring that communication flows smoothly and people feel supported, informed, and connected.

“Her deep institutional knowledge and strong networks across campus meant she almost always knew the right person to connect with or the best way to move something forward,” said Punya Mardhanan, a former colleague in VPIR and now assistant director of business operations for the Space Research Institute. “Crystal works incredibly efficiently and often completes things before anyone asks. She never seeks recognition for the many ways she supports her team.”

A Colleague, Advisor, and Steady Source of Wisdom

Hanson’s colleagues consistently describe her as someone who not only gets things done but also makes everyone around her better.

“She’s like a mother hen to the VPIR team,” said Rob Kadel, executive director of research program administration. “I can always go to Crystal and say, ‘Who should I talk to about this?’ and she will know exactly who to talk to. She is never afraid to speak her mind. She’s a trusted advisor.”

Her leadership has also extended beyond formal responsibilities. She played a key role in designing the VPIR workspace during renovations, coordinated team retreats and bonding activities, and infused every gathering with energy and warmth.

“She cares so much about the Georgia Tech community,” said Colly Mitchell, director of events and engagement for the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “Crystal is incredibly responsive, helpful, and friendly. She brings a big burst of energy to every gathering.”

“Words that immediately come to mind when I think of Crystal are collaborative, dependable, responsive, and a true breadth of knowledge,” adds Cynthia Moore, director of operations for the Institute for People and Technology, who worked alongside Hanson for nearly a decade. “Crystal will truly be missed, along with her knowledge of all things Georgia Tech and research.”

A Legacy of Generosity and Excellence

After nearly 14 years at Georgia Tech, Hanson will retire on April 1. She will be remembered as someone who connected people, solved problems, and always went above and beyond. 

According to Raheem Beyah, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, “Crystal was simply exceptional. She was a creative thought partner who provided outstanding support and strategic advice, and she became a dear friend. I am a better leader after working with Crystal, and Georgia Tech is a better place because of her. I can’t think of many people who deserve a wonderful retirement more than she does.”

Hanson looks forward to spending more time with her family, including her two daughters and two granddaughters, whose busy schedules she is eager to be part of. She and her husband have plans for travel, concerts — including those of her son-in-law’s band, Grouplove — and perhaps even a cruise around the world.

Georgia Tech extends its deepest gratitude to Crystal Hanson for her years of exceptional service, leadership, and dedication. Her impact will continue to resonate across the VPIR office, the IRIs, and the broader research community.

We wish her joy, adventure, and well-deserved rest in the next chapter of her life.

Precision agriculture uses tools and technologies such as GPS and sensors to monitor, measure and respond to changes within a farm field in real time. This includes using artificial intelligence technologies for tasks such as helping farmers apply pesticides only where and when they are needed.

However, precision agriculture has not been widely implemented in many rural areas of the United States.

We study smart communities, environmental health sciences and health policy and community health, and we participated in a research project on AI and pesticide use in a rural Georgia agricultural community.

Our team, led by Georgia Southern University and the City of Millen, with support from University of Georgia Cooperative Extension, local high schools and agriculture technology company FarmSense, is piloting AI-powered sensors to help cotton farmers optimize pesticide use. Georgia is one of the top cotton-producing states in the U.S., with cotton contributing nearly US$1 billion to the state’s economy in 2024. But only 13% of Georgia farmers use precision agriculture practices.

Public-Private-Academic Partnership

Innovation drives economic growth, but access to it often stops at major city limits. Smaller and rural communities are frequently left out, lacking the funding, partnerships and technical resources that fuel progress elsewhere.

At the same time, 75% of generative AI’s projected economic impact is concentrated in customer operations, marketing, software engineering and research and development, according to a 2023 McKinsey report. In contrast, applications of AI that improve infrastructure, food systems, safety and health remain underexplored.

Yet smaller and rural communities are rich in potential — home to anchor institutions like small businesses, civic groups and schools that are deeply invested in their communities. And that potential could be tapped to develop AI applications that fall outside of traditional corporate domains.

The Partnership for Innovation, a coalition of people and organizations from academia, government and industry, helps bridge that gap. Since its launch almost five years ago, the Partnership for Innovation has supported 220 projects across Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Texas and Alabama, partnering with more than 300 communities on challenges from energy poverty to river safety.

One Partnership for Innovation program provides seed funding and technical support for community research teams. This support enables local problem-solving that strengthens both research scholarship and community outcomes. The program has recently focused on the role of civic artificial intelligence – AI that supports communities and local governments. Our project on cotton field pesticide use is part of this program.

Cotton Pests and Pesticides

Our project in Jenkins County, Georgia, is testing that potential. Jenkins County, with a population of around 8,700, is among the top 25 cotton-growing counties in the state. In 2024, approximately 1.1 million acres of land in Georgia were planted with cotton, and based on the 2022 agricultural county profiles census, Jenkins County ranked 173rd out of the 765 counties producing cotton in the United States.

The state benefits from fertile soils, a subtropical-to-temperate climate, and abundant natural resources, all of which support a thriving agricultural industry. But these same conditions also foster pests and diseases.

Farmers in Jenkins County, like many farmers, face numerous insect infestations, including stink bugs, cotton bollworms, corn earworms, tarnished plant bugs and aphids. Farmers make heavy use of pesticides. Without precise data on the bugs, farmers end up using more pesticides than they likely need, risking residents’ health and adding costs.

While there are some existing tools for integrated pest management, such as the Georgia Cotton Insect Advisor app, they are not widely adopted and are limited to certain bugs. Other methods, such as traditional manual scouting and using sticky traps, are labor-intensive and time-consuming, particularly in the hot summer climate.

Our research team set out to combine AI-based early pest detection methods with existing integrated pest management practices and the insect advisor app. The goal was to significantly improve pest detection, decrease pesticide exposure levels and reduce insecticide use on cotton farms in Jenkins County. The work compares different insect monitoring methods and assesses pesticide levels in both the fields and nearby semi-urban areas.

We selected eight large cotton fields operated by local farmers in Millen, four active and four control sites, to collect environmental samples before farmers began planting cotton and applying pesticides.

The team was aided by a new AI-based insect monitoring system called the FlightSensor by FarmSense. The system uses a machine learning algorithm that was trained to recognize the unique wingbeats of each pest insect species. The specialized trap is equipped with infrared optical sensors that project an invisible infrared light beam – called a light curtain – across the entrance of a triangular tunnel. A sensor monitors the light curtain and uses the machine learning algorithm to identify each pest species as insects fly into the trap.

FlightSensor provides information on the prevalence of targeted insects, giving farmers an alternative to traditional manual insect scouting. The information enables the farmers to adjust their pesticide-spraying frequency to match the need.

What We’ve Learned

Here are three things we have learned so far:

1. Predictive pest control potential – AI tools can help farmers pinpoint exactly where pest outbreaks are likely – before they happen. That means they can treat only the areas that need it, saving time, labor and pesticide costs. It’s a shift from blanket spraying to precision farming – and it’s a skill farmers can use season after season.

2. Stronger decision-making for farmers – The preliminary results indicate that the proposed sensors can effectively monitor insect populations specific to cotton farms. Even after the sensors are gone, farmers who used them get better at spotting pests. That’s because the AI dashboards and mobile apps help them see how pest populations grow over time and respond to different field conditions. Researchers also have the ability to access this data remotely through satellite-based monitoring platforms on their computers, further enhancing the collaboration and learning.

3. Building local agtech talent – Training students and farmers on AI pest detection is doing more than protecting cotton crops. It’s building digital literacy, opening doors to agtech careers and preparing communities for future innovation. The same tools could help local governments manage mosquitoes and ticks and open up more agtech innovations.

Blueprint for Rural Innovation

By using AI to detect pests early and reduce pesticide use, the project aims to lower harmful residues in local soil and air while supporting more sustainable farming. This pilot project could be a blueprint for how rural communities use AI generally to boost agriculture, reduce public health risks and build local expertise.

Just as important, this work encourages more civic AI applications – grounded in real community needs – that others can adopt and adapt elsewhere. AI and innovation do not need to be urban or corporate to have a significant effect, nor do you need advanced technology degrees to be innovative. With the right partnerships, small towns, too, can harness innovations for economic and community growth.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Funded by Roland Ewubare, a distinguished Nigerian lawyer and corporate executive, the fellowship recognizes emerging scholars whose master’s or doctoral work meaningfully connects with societal engagement and impact. 

The program expands opportunities for graduate researchers committed to addressing real world challenges through innovative, community centered inquiry.

Nimo is a third year Ph.D. student in computer science and a graduate research assistant in the Technologies and International Development Lab led by Michael L. Best, executive director of the Institute for People and Technology and professor in both the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing. He is co-advised by Irfan Essa, professor in the School of Interactive Computing.

Nimo’s research explores human centered natural language processing for healthcare, as well as multilingual AI systems in low resource contexts. Nimo develops tools to evaluate and improve the safety, robustness, and global inclusion of language technologies. His broader goal is to build AI systems that are fair, reliable, and effective across diverse languages and cultures, helping ensure that technological advances benefit communities often overlooked in mainstream AI development.

“I’m very grateful to receive this fellowship for societal impact,” Nimo said. “Thank you for this support and believing in the work, and I’m excited to keep building research that translates into real world benefit.”

Nimo earned his B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and his M.S. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

With its compact form factor, capable arm, and relatively affordable price, Stretch has already become a favorite among researchers looking to push the boundaries of assistive robotics. The pitch competition invites Georgia Tech students to imagine not just what the robot can do, but what it should do to meaningfully improve daily life for people aging with disabilities.

This year, teams across several disciplines—from engineering, to business, to computing, and the sciences—submitted video pitches outlining how their technology concept tackles real-world problems users face. The winning team earned $1,000 and, more importantly, the chance to spend a semester working with Stretch in Georgia Tech’s Aware Home turning their pitch into a working prototype. Sponsors included TechSAge, AI-CARING, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and Hello Robot.

First place was awarded to “Chef Stretch,” a concept aimed at helping older adults with disabilities determine whether food has spoiled so they can prepare and consume food safely. The five-student team included Caitlin Woodward and Elizabeth Thompson (College of Engineering), Aditi Ashok (Scheller College of Business), and Michelle Gu and Vedita Sawhney (College of Sciences).

While Chef Stretch took the top prize, the judges awarded an honorable mention to Ali Vafaeian (College of Computing) for “Bimanual Clothes Manipulation and Assisted Dressing” with a $500 cash prize. His proposal tackles another essential activity of daily living, dressing, which can be challenging task for many individuals with mobility impairments. 

Read more about this competition and watch the winning students pitches >>

“IPaT is bringing two core competencies to both of these research pillars,” said Maribeth Gandy Coleman, IPaT’s director of research. “First, we’re advocating for and supporting the use of people-centered techniques to inform the research and co-designing the resulting system with all the stakeholders. Second, we’re also making sure we can translate this research into a real return on investment for Children’s. We are ensuring that what we design can be deployed in the hospital, and that it can be integrated with their existing systems and merge as seamlessly as possible with their existing workflows.”

Supporting Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence (Pillar 1)
Pillar 1 focuses on harnessing artificial intelligence to enable more personalized and predictive pediatric care. The work aims to improve data collection infrastructure, support equitable AI practices, and build a Children’s-Georgia Tech pediatric AI collaboration that integrates advanced AI tools into clinical workflows.

Clinical Deterioration Prediction
One of the flagship projects within Pillar 1 involves developing machine learning models that can detect clinical deterioration in hospitalized children. The goal is to identify when a patient needs urgent escalation to the intensive care unit — faster and more accurately than traditional monitoring.

To achieve this, IPaT research scientists are:

• Extracting and securely transferring electronic health record (EHR) data from Children’s clinical systems.
• Training predictive models using that real‑world data.
• Building the software infrastructure required to deploy these models inside Children’s.
• Integrating model outputs directly into the EHR using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources communication protocols. (FHIR is an international standard for the electronic exchange of healthcare information.)

This infrastructure is intentionally designed not just for this single project but as a repeatable, scalable framework for future AI‑enabled clinical tools developed through the Children’s-Georgia Tech partnership.

AI-Enhanced Decision-Making for Hospital Operations
A second emerging project under Pillar 1 aims to address one of healthcare’s most persistent operational challenges: ICU capacity management. Seasonal fluctuations, such as surges in flu or Covid‑19 cases, can create sudden ICU demand surges and staff illnesses, which can make scheduling and staffing decisions challenging.

IPaT is building models that incorporate historical hospital activity, seasonal variation, and real‑time census and staffing levels to predict scheduling needs and help Children’s optimize resource allocation. This research is just beginning, but holds the potential for improving both care delivery and staff well‑being. More importantly, IPaT is applying user-centered design and research techniques along with the engineering work to engage with Children’s people and processes to ensure that these prediction and resource allocation models actually work, and that they will actually be used and useful in the Children’s clinical environment. 

 

Supporting Patient‑Centered Care Delivery (Pillar 2)
Pillar 2 seeks to improve pediatric outcomes by focusing on the “whole child” — physical, psychological, social, and emotional well‑being — while accounting for the needs of families, caregivers, and community environments. Particular emphasis is placed on behavioral health, rural healthcare access, and chronic illness in underserved populations.

IPaT contributes to this work on two fronts:

User Experience and Workflow Research
IPaT’s user experience (UX) researchers conduct interviews, workflow studies, and design evaluations with Children’s clinicians and staff. This human‑centered research helps shape the interfaces, processes, and technologies needed to deliver patient‑centered care in practical, usable ways. These contributions ensure that tools created through the partnership align with the realities of clinical practice.

Data Integration for Behavioral and Social Insights
For Pillar 2 research, IPaT’s secure data enclave enables Children’s EHR data to be transferred, stored, and analyzed in a HIPAA‑compliant environment. Researchers are using this infrastructure to combine clinical data with voluntarily contributed social media information from consenting participants. The aim is to explore indicators of psychological well‑being, behavioral health trends, and early warnings related to self‑harm.

A Secure, Scalable Data Infrastructure to Support Both Pillars
The IPaT secure data enclave provides a protected, secure environment for storing and analyzing sensitive patient information. It serves as the backbone connecting Georgia Tech researchers with Children’s clinical systems. Both Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 research initiatives rely on this Georgia Tech IPaT-managed secure infrastructure to safely enable:

• EHR data transfer and storage.
• Machine learning model development.
• Testing and validation workflows.
• Eventual operational deployment back into Children’s systems.

This secure, scalable architecture is central to the shared goal of translating research into actionable clinical tools.

Accelerating Pediatric Discovery 
Georgia Tech’s partnership with Children’s represents a powerful model for cross‑institutional innovation. By aligning IPaT’s strengths in human‑centered design, machine learning, and secure data systems with Children’s clinical expertise, IPaT is helping to build solutions that move quickly from concept to bedside.

As these projects grow, especially with the ongoing expansion of the clinical deterioration system and the launch of the AI-enhanced operations initiative, IPaT research scientists anticipate even greater opportunities to support Children’s mission and improve pediatric health outcomes.

Thank you to Richard Starr for providing insight about these research projects.

The Georgia APCD Cost Comparison Tool (apcd.georgia.gov/cost-comparison-tool) contains information on more than 200 different medical procedures ranging from cardiac stress tests and childbirth to knee replacement and colonoscopies. The resource provides information on the median cost paid for the procedures statewide, along with information on what individual medical facilities and professional providers have been paid for each type of procedure. 

For each procedure, the tool identifies medical facility providers nearest to the consumer and includes facility ratings collected by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). For each facility providing a specific service, the comparison data includes the median cost for the procedure and the range of costs that were paid. Costs can be filtered by payer category, including commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid. While that data is understandably incomplete and includes caveats, developers of the new service say it provides a much-needed resource for Georgians facing a decision on a costly medical procedure.

“In health care, there are a lot of factors that can drive cost and it’s not always a straightforward equation, so it’s worth doing the research,” said Dr. Jon Duke, an M.D. and principal research scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s (GTRI) Health Emerging and Advanced Technologies Division, which administers the APCD for the state of Georgia. “This is really just one part of health care decision-making, and it will help patients be more proactive advocates for themselves when considering potential options for care.”

Dr. Duke is also a faculty member in Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology. You can read the full article published by the Georgia Tech Research Institute here.

Their project, “Designing Futures: Afrofuturist Co-Creation with AI for Community-Led Facade Design” will be realized during a 16-week design studio (ARCH 4016) class that will take place during fall 2026 and serve senior undergraduate architecture students. Participants from diverse majors will join through the Building for Equity and Sustainability Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) team, in partnership with the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE). Pre-planning tasks will occur spring semester in preparation for the fall studio class.

The studio class will collaborate with Moinak Choudhury and students in LMC 3403, who bring expertise in technical communication, responsible AI use, and community-based learning to co-create engagement materials and public-facing documentation that strengthen the project’s interdisciplinary links between design, sustainability, and communication. 

The final result of the project encompasses students who will design and install a modular, solar-powered façade panel system for the outdoor classroom on WAWA’s campus. This project extends work done by a previous Georgia Tech VIP team.

The panels will serve multiple functions: participatory community engagement, artistic expression, and climate regulation. This project will advance the classroom toward its intended vision as an Afrofuturist learning space with technological nods to the Keneda Building on Georgia Tech’s campus. With the help of this seed grant, interdisciplinary team members will delve into design, engineering, computing, communication, and community partnership.

The wearable device measures and records important clinical parameters such as heart rate, respiration rate, temperature, electrocardiograms, and blood oxygen saturation. Speedy detection of abnormal readings in resource-challenged neonatal units could significantly reduce newborn mortality rates.

The device’s pilot study, conducted at Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital (TASH) in Addis Ababa, in collaboration with Abebaw Fekadu, Ph.D., from the Centre for Innovative Drug Development and Therapeutic Trials for Africa (CDT Africa Inc.), and neonatologist Asrat Demtse, M.D., from the TASH department of pediatrics, demonstrated a significant improvement over current vital sign monitoring and recording methods by providing continuous oversight using less medical equipment while also reducing handwritten paper tracking. Vital signs are a group of the most crucial medical data that indicate the status of the body's life-sustaining functions. The pairing of this wearable system with a smartphone app automated the monitoring process and delivered a superior level of neonatal care compared to the current processes at Ethiopia’s best hospital. 

Medical staff and parents also observed a reduced need to wake their babies when using the wearable monitoring system. In addition, after participating in the study, 84% of Ethiopian parents said they would use the device at home.

“Professor Hong Yeo and I connected immediately after he gave a brief research talk about a new, wearable cardiac monitor for children,” said Rudy Gleason. “I asked him if we could co-develop a wearable device for newborn babies in Ethiopia that measured not one, but a variety of vital signs. We both thought it was a great idea.”

Yeo and Gleason are faculty members in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. And both are affiliated with Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology, which seeks to improve global health.

In 2009, Gleason and his wife were in the process of adopting a baby from Ethiopia named Kennedy. Before they could bring her home, however, she died — the result, Gleason said, of a seemingly preventable combination of malnutrition and diarrhea.

“This loss redirected my academic teaching, research, and service activities at Georgia Tech,” said Gleason. “Since then, I’ve spent most of my career focused on developing resource-appropriate biomedical devices to reduce maternal and child mortality.”

“When we started this latest study, Ethiopian parents were reluctant to participate. But once we recruited a few mothers in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), everyone in the NICU community wanted their child to participate in our wearable health monitoring system.”

According to Yeo, “We designed the wearable patch as a safe, clinical-grade solution with minimal skin irritation. Its key design advantage lies in the use of nanomembranes, which allows the device to be soft and highly conformal to the baby's skin. Wearing the device helps to ensure critical events are not missed since the built-in automation acts as a force multiplier, freeing clinical staff to focus more on complex decision-making rather than manual data acquisition.”

“Rudy has a deep love for the people of Ethiopia. I feel fortunate to have met him as we embark on this project aimed at helping sick babies in the country. Without his support, I could not envision bringing this technology to Ethiopia,” said Yeo.

During the past decade, child mortality rates have decreased in Ethiopia, but newborn deaths have remained mostly unchanged. Both Yeo and Gleason feel their new wearable neonatal device could significantly lower mortality rates for newborns in Ethiopia as they advance this research. 

Citation: Zhou, L., Joseph, M., Lee, Y.J. et al. Soft, all-in-one, nanomembrane wearable system for advancing neonatal health monitoring in Ethiopia. npj Digit. Med. 8, 575 (2025).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-01974-8

Funding: Gates Foundation (INV-006189) and the National Institutes of Health (R01HD100635). This work was also supported by the Imlay Foundation—Innovation Fund.

The winning team members were Taiga Cogger, Ryuichiro Go, Kokoro Cogger, and Taiyo Mitsuoka. The team won $2,000 dollars. The team’s faculty sponsor was Kiichiro DeLuca, a faculty member at Waseda University and partner at WERU Investment, a global early-stage venture capital firm based in Tokyo.

As the winner, the Revive & Survive student team is also invited to be part of Georgia Tech’s Create-X startup launch in summer 2026 as well as Georgia Tech’s Demo Day, August 2026, in Atlanta. Some travel support for the Atlanta trip will be provided.

Revive & Survive’s project empowers communities through regional revitalization and disaster preparedness for a more resilient and sustainable future.

CIC is a competition recognizing student innovation and entrepreneurship responding to today’s global challenges and opportunities. Founded in 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia, CIC is organized by IPaT at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

For the 2025-2026 final pitches and award ceremony, the competition landed in Kaula Lampur, Malaysia. The competition focused on student teams from China, India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Each year, organizers and participants forge new partnerships and foster more collaborations across the Asian continent. IPaT’s CIC Asia Faculty Fellows help cultivate those team projects and the students showcase their innovative ideas during the competition.

“The CIC students, the support of the faculty fellows, the final competition presentations, and the invited industry forum combine to create a special and unique event,” said IPaT executive director Michael Best. “All of the student finalist projects represented the very best in people-centered technologies responding to global challenges.”

CIC Asia is distinct in how it brings teams from multiple countries together to interact and network. Most innovation competitions are single university or country.

The four runner-up finalist teams each received $1,000 dollars in prize money. The CIC Asia runner-up team projects and team members are listed below:

• ChiliCare is an IoT and AI farming app with auto watering, pest detection, microclimate insights, crop plotting, and smart fertilizer guidance. Team Members: Muhammad Haizad bin Murad, Hafiy Azfar bin Mohd Masri, Hazriq Haykal Norrol Farhan, Muhammad Naim bin Mazni. Faculty Fellow: Dr. Masrah Azrifah Azmi Murad. Mentor: Dr. Azrina binti Kamaruddin. University: Universiti Putra Malaysia.
   
• PlaySpot makes booking sports facilities in the Philippines simple, and accessible for everyone. Team Members: Louie Gee G. Cabagay, Alwin Matthew T. Chiong, Daniel Justine R. Jadman, Raphael Luis T. Malolos. Faculty Fellow: Mr. Paulo Luis T. Lozano. University: De La Salle University (The Philippines).
   
• CityFix is a mobile and web platform enabling citizens to quickly report and track municipal issues with GPS, photos, and real-time updates. Team Member: Ng Jia Hong. Faculty Fellow: Ms. Putri Syaidatul Akma Binti Mohd Azmi. University: Multimedia University (Malaysia).
   
• Flow Vending Machine proposed having vending machines which dispense biodegradable pads installed around campus toilets to help women to have easy access to sanitary pads. Team Members: Ava Jeslina binti Mohd Jamil, Abigail Siew Kar Yan, Ashley Shakyna, Geneve Tsen Fan Qin. Faculty Fellow: Ms. Putri Syaidatul Akma, J.D. Mentor: Ms. Raja Razana Bt Raja Razali. University: Multimedia University (Malaysia).
   

Future Tech Forum

The CIC event took place alongside the Future Tech Forum which was also organized by IPaT. The forum focused on innovations, opportunities, and advancements associated with human-centered AI, sustainable data centers, and digital trust and security. Expert panels and speakers from across Asia and Georgia Tech discussed the state of art in a rapidly changing world, with particular attention to what it means for Asian nations. The event was invitation only and limited to 150 attendees of established leaders and emerging innovators.

Participating technology speakers and panelists included:

• Honorable YB Tuan Gobind Singh Deo, Minister, Ministry of Digital, Malaysia
• Chee Mun Foong, CEO, YTL AI Labs; and CPO, Ryt Bank
• Chen Change Loy, President's Chair Professor, CCDS, NTU; Director, MMLab@NTU; and Co-Associate Director, S-Lab
• John Lim Ji Xiong, Chief Digital Officer, GAMUDA
• Henry Yang, CMO, Manus
• Ding Wang, Senior Researcher, Responsible AI, Google Research
• Benjamin Croc, CEO, BrioHR
• Tzu Kit Chan, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Risks and Safety Advisor of Top Universities in the USA, Singapore, Canada, and France
• Hari Krishnan, Co-founder and CEO of Genie Health
• Benoit Dubeau, Energy Strategy Manager, APAC, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Cindy Lin, Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech
• Ko Chuan Zhen, Group CEO & Co-Founder, Plus Xnergy, and Executive Director, BM Greentech
• Zachary Loh, Market Development Manager, Hydroleap
• Nge Foong Kheng, Engineering Manager, APAC, Global Switch
• Verghese Jacob, SVP Technology, DayOne

A photo album of the CIC and Future Tech Forum events can be viewed here.
 

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The project began when Clint Zeagler, principal research scientist and IPaT’s director of strategic partnerships, invited Ellisor to “think big” and imagine how technology could amplify his artistic vision. “This was definitely a moment for me to step out of my comfort zone and to think on a bigger scale,” said Ellisor. “Coming from a poor artist background, we’re always just struggling to make anything. This was an opportunity to dream.”

“Artist residencies within Georgia Tech’s research centers and interdisciplinary research institutes help to drive innovation in our research enterprise, to discover new applications of our research within the arts, to build strong connections with community partners, and — most important of all — to create impactful new works of art,” said Jason Freeman, associate vice provost for the arts at Georgia Tech. “IPaT has long been at the forefront of GT’s initiatives to collaborate with Atlanta-area artists. I am thrilled to see the success of this latest collaboration between Clint Zeagler and Corian Ellisor.”

Ellisor, an Atlanta-based performance artist with a focus on dance theater, was selected as the IPaT’s  2025 artist-in-residence. Ellisor has worked with arts communities locally and internationally including Georgia, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, Washington DC, New York, Guatemala, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany and The United Kingdom. He was awarded the choreography award at the University of Houston, The Walthall Fellowship through WonderRoot, “Top 20 people to watch in 2013" by Atlanta’s Creative loafing, an Atlanta Beltline Grant in 2014, an artist in residency award with the Lucky Penny in 2015, and the Best Choreography Award at the Houston Fringe Festival in 2019.

World Building Meets Performance Art
Ellisor’s concept centered on world building, a technique often used in gaming but adapted here for live performance. The goal was to create an immersive environment where audiences could interact and react, while maintaining an uplifting aesthetic. “I wanted something that leaves the audience feeling good—something hopeful,” Ellisor explained. To develop the project, Ellisor and Zeagler hosted workshops with Georgia Tech students and community members, encouraging free-form creation and dialogue around the question: How do people find joy and peace in a chaotic world? Three teams of Georgia Tech undergraduate students were assigned to collaborate with Ellisor and make an avatar of him. The first team was assigned to reproduce Ellisor’s voice. The second team was assigned to generate a visual likeness of Ellisor. The third team worked on the outside aesthetics of a story booth.

The Story Booth: Technology Meets Emotion
A highlight of the residency was the Story Booth, a tech-enabled installation designed to collect personal narratives about joy and solace. Outfitted with full-body scans and voice capture, the booth featured a digital representation of Ellisor and used sentiment analysis to translate stories into color projections. “If someone shared something happy, the booth glowed orange; if it was sentimental, it turned blue,” Ellisor noted. These dynamic visuals illuminated both the booth and its surroundings, creating a striking display of emotion through light.

An Hour of Galleries Time
The residency culminated in “An Hour of Galleries Time,” an event combining video installations, interactive storytelling, and live dance performances. Dancers engaged with projected visuals before joining together for a collective performance against a massive, illuminated backdrop—transforming the space into a living canvas of movement and light. The interactive performance was held November 23 at the Goat Farm Arts Center, a visual and performing arts center housed in a 19th-century complex of industrial buildings in west midtown Atlanta.

Reflections on Collaboration
Ellisor described the experience as transformative, “I am very happy to have met this community of technologists that I would have never met because our worlds just do not cross at all. Another enlightening experience was trusting myself and trusting the vision—and then letting other people do what they’re supposed to do. Usually as an artist, we are sort of a solo factory. But having the trust in other people to make your vision happen—and it happening—was a really lovely experience.” He added, “I am very grateful to have gone through this with Georgia Tech. There are some tech folks there that were very happy about the final product, which makes me happy.”

Georgia Institute of Technology has been ranked 7th in the world in the 2026 Times Higher Education Interdisciplinary Science Rankings, in association with Schmidt Science Fellows. This designation underscores Georgia Tech’s leadership in research that solves global challenges. 

Winners and finalists for the 2025 Foley Scholar Awards were celebrated at Georgia Tech's hotel and convention center on November 5, 2025. The event was hosted by the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) with its executive director, Michael Best, serving as the master of ceremonies as each finalist was recognized for their innovative research. 

Many winners of this scholarship have moved into faculty positions or became industry leaders in their research areas. 

"Both the winners and the finalists represent the brightest minds that Georgia Tech has to offer," said Michael Best. "Our finalist candidate pool is always composed of truly outstanding researchers. Selecting the winners is never easy," said Best.

James Foley, professor emeritus and computing pioneer in graphics and human-computer interaction for whom the awards are named, once again delivered inspiring and valuable insight at the conclusion of the evening's festivities celebrating the achievements of all finalists.
 

Congratulations to the 2025 Foley Scholar winners who are:

Joon Kum, M.S. student in human-computer interaction was awarded $1,000.

Rachel Lowy, Ph.D. student in human-computer interaction was awarded $5,000.

Niharika Mathur, Ph.D student in human-centered computing was awarded $5,000.

Mohsin Yousufi, Ph.D student in human centered computing was awarded $5,000.

The finalists in the master's category were Umme Ammara, Jo Chung, Joon Kum, and Christine Taylor.

The finalists in the Ph.D. category were Grace Barkhuff, Rachel Lowy, Niharika Mathur, Shravika Mittal, Michelle Reckner, Mohsin Yousufi, Yilun Zha, and Qiao Zhang.

A short description of each finalists' unique research along with their Georgia Tech faculty advisor is listed below:

Umme Ammara is a master's student in human computer interaction advised by Michael Best and Carrie Bruce. Her research vision is using human-centered design to improve healthcare systems in underserved settings.

Jo Chung is a master's student in computer science advised by Betsy DiSalvo. Her research vision is to design interactive systems that empower users through meaningful engagement and equitable access.

Joon Kum is a master's student in human computer interaction advised by Ashok Goel. His research vision is closely aligned with IPaT’s mission and values. He believes in the power of interdisciplinary research to support teachers and students, especially for those who are marginalized and underrepresented.

Christine Taylor is a master's student in human computer interaction advised by Maribeth Coleman. Her core research vision is to design meaningful, human-centered technologies that address high-stakes problems in collaboration with the communities they serve. For example, one of her current research projects focuses on designing an AI predictive tool to detect patient deterioration at Children’s Hospital of Atlanta.

Grace Barkhuff is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Ellen Zegura. Her research vision centers around computing education and ethics. For example, her current research seeks to understand how instructors can ethically use GenAI in the higher education classroom.

Rachel Lowy is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Jennifer Kim. Her research focuses on building accessible technologies that foster learning, agency, and inclusion for people with disabilities and neurodivergent people, whose cognitive and learning profiles differ from those of the broader population, through strengths-based understandings of their skillsets.

Niharika Mathur is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing advised by Sonia Chernova and Elizabeth Mynatt. Her research vision involve building human-centered AI systems that not just perform reliably, but also explain themselves in user-aligned ways.

Shravika Mittal is a Ph.D. student in computer science advised by Munmun De Choudhury. Her research goal is to help create a safe, inclusive, and responsible online information ecosystem, one that empowers vulnerable groups with equitable knowledge, the freedom to communicate their struggles openly, and a supportive community.

Michelle Reckner is a Ph.D. student in civil engineering advised by Iris Tien. Her research vision is to develop the most effective decision-making methodologies possible utilizing available data to determine whether to repair old infrastructure or construct new infrastructure while considering the types of infrastructure that will most benefit a community. 

Mohsin Yousufi is a Ph.D. student in digital media advised by Yanni Loukissas. His research vision is to investigate and build creative technologies that address systemic epistemic injustices and reinvigorate democratic civic engagement.

Yilun Zha is a Ph.D. student in architecture advised by Ellen Dunham-Jones and Hui Cai. His research addresses food challenges by developing and applying geospatial computational methods to investigate how the design of the built environment and emerging technologies influence dietary behaviors and contribute to diet-related diseases.

Qiao Zhang is a Ph.D. student in computer science advised by Christopher MacLellan. Her research involves designing and investigating human-AI teaming studies—identifying suitable tasks, agent types, and natural paths for alignment and adaptation.

A collection of photos from the November 5, 2025, Foley Scholar awards dinner are available here.

The all-day workshop was sponsored by the Georgia Tech Wearable Intelligent Systems and Healthcare Center (WISH Center), the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and the Institute for Matter and Systems (IMS). 

Academic, clinical, and industry leaders gathered to learn about some of the most exciting wearable technologies and explore proven, practical solutions for improving health in underserved rural areas. Medical professionals from Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Albany, Georgia shared real-world solutions to providing more effective healthcare in their regional, rural areas.

The morning keynote speaker was Philipp Gutruf, Ph.D., an associate professor and associate department head of biomedical engineering at the University of Arizona. Gutruf’s research focuses on creating devices that intimately integrate with biological systems, developing wireless, battery-free, and fully implantable platforms for biosignal monitoring, neurostimulation, and biointerfaces.

The afternoon keynote speaker was Kimberlee McKay, M.D., with Avera Medical Group in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. McKay is a physician-leader in women’s health who has redefined how obstetrics and gynecology are delivered across rural and underserved communities. 

A technology panel moderated by Alexander Adams, Ph.D., assistant professor, in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech included:
* Andrea Braden, M.D., Founder & CEO of Lybbie and medical director of the Atlanta Birth Center
* Farrokh Ayazi, Ph.D., director of the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium, Regents Entrepreneur, and Ken Byers Professorship in Microsystems
* Rosa Arriaga, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at Georgia Tech
* Steve Xu, M.D., CEO Sibel Health, medical director at Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics Northwestern University was scheduled, but was unable to attend.

In the afternoon, a rural health panel was moderated by Rudolph Gleason, Ph.D., professor in mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech. 
Those panelists were:
* Shelly Spires, M.S.M., CEO Albany Area Primary Health Care, Inc.
* W. Brad Jones, Ph.D., CEO Life Well Promotions
* Ruwanthi Ekanayake, M.D./Ph.D. candidate, Emory University - Rollins School of Public Health and Emory School of Medicine

The best poster awards were won by postdoctoral research fellow Jimin Lee, Ph.D., and mechanical engineering doctoral student Garan Byun. The best rapid talk award winner was Ramy Ghanim, a doctoral student in chemical engineering.

Key faculty organizers of this year’s event included W. Hong Yeo, director of the WISH Center and professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Clint Zeagler, director of strategic partnerships in IPaT; Josh Lee, research program manager in the WISH Center; Alexander Adams, assistant professor, School of Interactive Computing; and Rudy Gleason, professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Open to all Georgia Tech graduate students, the fellowship provides $15,000 in support—disbursed to the recipient’s advisor—and offers a unique opportunity to collaborate with The Carter Center’s Democracy Program. Fellows are expected to engage in IPaT programming and contribute to ongoing research and communications efforts throughout the year.

Shazia’s research centers on the sociopolitical dynamics of the Hazara community in Balochistan, Pakistan. Her dissertation, titled “Assemblages of Security: Violence and (re)Construction of identities in the Case of Hazaras,” explores how digital platforms have reshaped traditional forms of resistance and identity formation. As part of the fellowship, she will focus on how Hazaras have used platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X) to transform sit-in protests into new modes of democratic struggle.

Her study poses critical questions: How have digital technologies influenced local governance in Balochistan? In what ways have these platforms enabled global advocacy for Hazaras? And how has digital activism contributed to the shaping of Hazara identity both within Pakistan and on the international stage?

“These questions speak directly to the missions of both The Carter Center and IPaT,” said Shazia. “I have always wanted to bring digital democracy into my research because of the 2013 Hazaras protest in Balochistan, Pakistan, which incorporated the use of online digital platforms. Online posts and engagement eventually resulted in the dissolution of the local government.”

The concept of “digital democracy” has gained traction in recent scholarship, often described as a transformative force capable of revolutionizing governance and citizen engagement. Shazia’s work exemplifies this potential, offering insights into how marginalized communities leverage technology for political agency and global visibility.

Her selection as Digital Democracy Fellow underscores Georgia Tech’s commitment to interdisciplinary research and highlights The Carter Center’s ongoing efforts to support democratic engagement through technology.

Shazia will be working closely with Anthony DeMattee, Ph.D., a data scientist in The Carter Center Democracy Program. She is advised by Amit Prasad, professor of sociology in the School of History and Sociology.

“This Fellowship represents the significant partnership between IPaT and the Democracy Program at The Carter Center, centered on the digital transformations of democratic practice,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “Shazia’s research will focus on how social media platforms have reshaped the politics of a community that is too often overlooked.”  

However, precision agriculture has not been widely implemented in many rural areas of the United States.

We study smart communities, environmental health sciences and health policy and community health, and we participated in a research project on AI and pesticide use in a rural Georgia agricultural community.

Our team, led by Georgia Southern University and the City of Millen, with support from University of Georgia Cooperative Extension, local high schools and agriculture technology company FarmSense, is piloting AI-powered sensors to help cotton farmers optimize pesticide use. Georgia is one of the top cotton-producing states in the U.S., with cotton contributing nearly US$1 billion to the state’s economy in 2024. But only 13% of Georgia farmers use precision agriculture practices.

Read the full story here >>

Marks, an award-winning designer and educator, is known for her research that merges endangered and traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling to create new methods of production. Before joining Georgia Tech, she worked in New York with clients including Google, Nike, and Swarovski. She holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Parsons School of Design. 

In her new role, Marks is leading the program’s launch and laying the groundwork for a vibrant student community. “This year, we’re piloting classes and renovating studio spaces to welcome incoming students,” she explained. “My goal is to make sure that when the permanent chair steps in, they inherit a strong, well-planned program and a supportive community.” 

For Marks, the opportunity to shape a new academic program is a milestone. “I always thought this was something I might do ten years from now. Getting the chance to help launch a new school so early in my career is both exciting and humbling. This has always been a goal of mine.”

She also emphasized the significance of this moment for the Institute. “At an Institute best known for its strengths in engineering and technology, it’s remarkable to see leadership embrace the arts as essential to innovation. The enthusiasm across campus—from students, faculty, and administration alike—shows how much creative technologies can strengthen every discipline.” 

Dean Ellen Bassett highlighted the importance of Marks’ leadership during the program’s formative stage, noting that the degree offers “the most creative option in the state of Georgia for combining talents in design and technology into viable, thriving careers.” 

With Marks at the helm, Georgia Tech is positioning its Arts, Entertainment, and Creative Technologies degree to become a national model—blending creativity, arts practice, and technology into a transformative educational experience.

By Melissa Alonso | September 24, 2025 

View the news posting at the College of Design >>

The inaugural cohort began their studies in August, setting a precedent for future scholarship opportunities and academic collaboration between Georgia Tech and Liberian institutions. 

The initiative results from a strategic partnership between the University Consortium for Liberia (UCL) and Georgia Tech aimed at expanding access to world-class computer science education for Liberian students. Cynthia Blandford, president and CEO of UCL and former honorary consul for the Republic of Liberia in Atlanta expressed her pride in the milestone.

“The UCL's mission is to help provide brighter futures through education and understanding and this includes student and faculty exchanges, curriculum development, academic scholarships, joint research, and fundraising,” said Blandford.

The announcement follows a 2023 visit to Atlanta by Liberian President Joseph Boakai during which Georgia Tech formally introduced the OMSCS scholarship program for Liberia. Michael Best, executive director of the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech emphasized the program's significance.

“Georgia Tech was delighted to host the president of Liberia,” said Best. “This is the first time the OMSCS degree at Georgia Tech is providing complete fellowships to students. I am so glad Liberia is our partner in this groundbreaking program.”

The OMSCS program, hailed by Forbes as the “greatest degree program ever,” is the first fully accredited online master’s degree in computer science offered by a major U.S. university. It combines academic rigor with the flexibility of online learning, allowing students to earn the same degree as their on-campus peers.

Best added that completing the program will be a personal achievement for the students and a strategic investment in Liberia’s future.

“The graduates of this program will help to ensure that Liberia is a full participant and contributor to our digital age. These students’ advanced training will position them for leadership and impact within Liberia and beyond.”

University of Liberia (UL) President Layli Maparyan is excited about the collaboration with Georgia Tech and UCL. 

“The Georgia Tech OMSCS is equipping UL’s computer science faculty and IT staff with a profound degree of capacity building,” she stated. “This positions UL well for planned curricular developments in AI, cybersecurity, and other key IT areas of study. We are profoundly grateful to Georgia Tech for the timely launch.”

The 12 University of Liberia students accepted in the program are:

• Harris Barwu
• Clarence Carlwolo
• Viola Cheeseman
• Alieu Farhat
• Varney Jarteh
• Fredrick Juah
• Abubakar Keita
• Yougie Kessellie
• Josephus Nyumalin
• Melvin Soclo
• Michael Umunna
• Martin Wallace

Research overview: Research and practice at the intersection of AI and global health has grown rapidly in the last few years, yet most of these efforts are fragmented and disconnected. There is a pressing need for spaces that facilitate knowledge-sharing and resource coordination in this space. We are thus launching a global, interdisciplinary Research to Impact Collaborative (RIC) on AI and global health that will: 1) support knowledge-sharing across research and practice, 2) facilitate student learning, and 3) accelerate cross-sector collaborations. To catalyze the RIC, we will conduct a year-long virtual seminar series and in-person workshops that will bring together researchers, practitioners, and students. This initiative will position Georgia Tech as a leader in AI and global health, build a lasting collaborative, and lay the foundation for interdisciplinary collaborations and future funding.

Team members: Naveena Karusala, Neha Kumar, and Munmun De Choudhury at the School of Interactive Computing; Kai Wang at the School of Computational Science and Engineering; Gari Clifford at the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Additional members: Azra Ismail (Emory University), Anupriya Tuli and Madeline Balaam (KTH), Pushpendra Singh (IIIT-Delhi), Melissa Densmore (University of Cape Town), Naomi Yamashita (Kyoto University), Neha Madhiwalla (ARMMAN), Shirley Yan and Anubhav Arora (Noora Health)

2) Proposal title: Project: Are Data Centers the New Landfills?

Research overview: Data centers are growing rapidly in the U.S., with nowhere more notable than in Georgia, particularly in the Atlanta metropolitan region (Berger, 2025). This expansion continues as policymakers and the data center industry position data centers as a source of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), national security, and economic growth brought by the financial returns of data centers. Data center energy use has nearly tripled in the last decade to a total of 4.4% of electricity use in the US and may triple again over the next decade (Shehabi et al., 2024). This growth is driven by increasing demands for data-intensive technologies and applications, like AI, and a data center-friendly policy climate in Georgia (see Georgia HB1291). Like landfills, data centers are often sited in ways that impose local external costs, impacting important aspects of everyday life, such as water security, energy prices, taxes, jobs, housing, and air quality. In Georgia, a proposed data center consumes approximately 6 million gallons of water per day, a volume equivalent to filling nine Olympic-sized swimming pools (Mecke, 2025). Furthermore, the tax revenue that Georgia generates from data centers is estimated to be far less than the cost of incentives provided to the industry (e.g. subsidies for equipment), resulting in a negative state fiscal impact of $18 million in 2021 (Hardee et al., 2022). This proposed IPAT Research Grant investigates the trade-offs in constructing data centers, weighing the economic benefits against their external impacts on local Atlanta communities. In doing so, we aim to develop the next generation of responsible and ethical data centers that aim to inform and empower communities exposed to the externalities imposed by data centers. Scholars of data centers argue that community experiences of data centers rarely feature alongside the dominant promises of data centers such as economic growth and technological innovation (Zander 2024). Highlighting these alternative experiences, we will suggest policy and data tools to better site, deploy, and discuss how data centers are built, maintained, and shape the lives of their neighbors.

Team members:  Cindy Lin and Josiah Hester, School of Interactive Computing; Allen Hyde, School of History and Sociology; Joe Bozeman III, School of Civil Engineering; Elora Raymond, School of City and Regional Planning; Anthony Harding, School of Public Policy and Jung Ho Lewe, School of Aerospace Engineering.

3) Proposal title: The Sound of Motion: Transforming Artistic Body Movement into Music for Motor Therapy Investigators

Research overview: This research proposal aims to initiate a new collaborative project across the Colleges of Sciences, Computing, and Liberal Arts to start designing and developing a novel platform that enables augmented artistic expression exercise through body movements as instruments. When a person moves their trunk, legs, arms, or a handheld object (e.g., a Wizarding wand), the platform will transform their movement trajectories into the associated sounds of musical instruments (i.e., sonification). Turning the movement trajectories into sounds will enable people with motor disabilities (e.g., Parkinson’s disease; stroke) to express their artistry with their less-impaired body parts. Additionally, developing augmented artistic exercises as a new rehabilitation paradigm may stimulate previously untapped neuromotor strategies and facilitate motor recovery. Furthermore, the quality of artistic movement can be objectively assessed through this platform. Experts in human motor control (Shinohara), sonification and human-AI interaction (Walker), and human-computer interaction in the performing arts (Trajkova) will combine their complementary expertise to design and develop such a multimodal system, demonstrating proof of concept. This interdisciplinary R&D will benefit older adults and individuals with motor impairments by enhancing their well-being by introducing new, enjoyable, engaging, and rewarding artistic expressions or exercises. Such activities can enhance the release of neurotransmitters that facilitate neural plasticity (e.g., dopamine), ultimately leading to improved motor function.

Team members: Minoru Shinohara, College of Sciences; Bruce Walker, College of Computing; Milka Trajkova, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts; Joshua Posen, College of Engineering.

4) Proposal title: Generating Space-making Companion Robot Behaviors through Large Language Models (LLMs) for Morally Ambiguous Situations.

Research overview: Increasingly operating in public spaces and urban life, robots can be easily caught in such morally ambiguous situations, which are often dynamic, complex, and unpredictable, presenting novel factors and agencies that can quickly exceed the scope of any projected (or pre-programmed) human-robot interaction. LLMs are well-suited to interpreting specific scenarios and producing logically coherent responses, which makes them ideal for contexts where pre-programming robot behavior is impractical. In this project, we investigate whether and how LLMs can generate appropriate behaviors for a space-making robot reading companion in morally ambiguous situations.

Team members: Yixiao Wang, School of Industrial Design; Tyler Cook, Carter School of Public Policy; Shreyas C Kousik, School of Mechanical Engineering.

A research team in the Atlantic Ocean listens to dolphins, testing technology that may one day decode their communication system. Thousands of miles away, a Parkinson’s patient may speak more clearly, thanks to a device that helps them overcome speech challenges caused by the condition. One sounds like science fiction; the other is a transformative medical breakthrough. Yet both are rooted in the same field of research: ubiquitous computing.

Scott Gilliland, a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), has played a key role in developing these technologies. IPaT connects researchers across disciplines to turn innovative ideas into practical applications. It’s a natural fit for Gilliland, whose work blends human-centered design with embedded systems, which are small computers built into everyday devices to perform specific tasks.

As a researcher, he often partners with colleagues in the College of Computing, where he also earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. His work in ubiquitous computing and wearable systems is quietly reshaping how we interact with the world.

“Ubiquitous computing” refers to technology that is embedded in everyday objects and environments — for example, clothing. It makes computing power accessible without being intrusive. Gilliland’s projects span different fields of study that aim for the same goal: real-world benefit through innovative, human-centered technology.

Learn more about research scientist Scott Gilliland >

The EXCEL program — short for expanding career, education, and leadership opportunities—is a four-year college experience designed for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It leads to two certificates and focuses on academic enrichment, social growth, career development, and independent living. 

“We accept students from across the country, not just Georgia,” said Sherri Burrell, EXCEL’s mentorship coordinator. “Our goal is to prepare our students for life after college, and that includes learning how to live independently.”

Burrell joined the EXCEL team in August 2024 and quickly identified a gap in the program: students needed a hands-on space to learn about nutrition, cooking, and healthy living — skills that could not be taught effectively in a traditional classroom. That’s when she connected with Brian Jones, director of research at Georgia Tech’s Aware Home lab.

The Aware Home, a three-story, 5,040-square-foot living laboratory, is designed to simulate a real home environment where Georgia Tech researchers, faculty, and students can develop and test innovative technologies. With its fully equipped kitchen and smart home capabilities, it offers an ideal setting for EXCEL students — many of whom are tactile learners — to engage in real-world, hands-on learning.

The partnership began with current EXCEL students and their Georgia Tech mentors — traditional students who support EXCEL participants in areas like social development, wellness, and life transitions. Together, mentors and mentees learned to prepare simple, nutritious meals. “It wasn’t just beneficial for our EXCEL students,” Burrell noted. “Many of the mentors were also new to cooking. They learned new skills and knowledge right alongside their mentees.”

The collaboration expanded into the EXCEL Summer Academy, a two-week program for high school juniors and seniors interested in applying to EXCEL. During the summer sessions, prospective students visited the Aware Home to explore topics like nutrition, dining, and making healthy food choices. “Even though incoming students are on a meal plan and don’t have kitchens, it’s still important they understand how to make smart decisions about what they eat,” Burrell said.

A Legacy of Research Innovation

Beyond this Excel program educational role, the Aware Home, the first residential laboratory of its type, has a rich legacy of shaping the future of smart home technology. One of its most influential contributors is Shwetak Patel, a Georgia Tech alumnus and now a professor at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Patel’s time in the Aware Home as a Ph.D. student profoundly influenced his career and the broader field of ubiquitous computing. He described how the Aware Home lab’s impact on his research career fell into three distinct “buckets”:

1. Career Transformation

Patel credits the Aware Home with fundamentally reshaping his career path. His early exposure to real-world research problems in a home-like setting helped him discover his passion for applied computer science and human-centered innovation. “It totally informed the way I do research now,” he said.

2. Living Laboratory Innovation

The Aware Home’s immersive environment allowed Patel to explore practical challenges in home sensing and automation. His doctoral work, Infrastructure Mediated Sensing, focused on detecting water and electricity usage, human presence, and environmental context—technologies that laid the foundation for the smart home industry. This research led to the creation of startups like Zensi and Phyn, and influenced commercial products such as Belkin’s Conserve line, smart meters, and even [Google] Nest and Sense devices. Patel is also a distinguished engineer and health technologies leader at Google who guided  many of Google’s smart home technologies. “You can draw a direct line from our early work in the Aware Home to the smart home technologies we see today,” Patel explained.

3. Defining Innovation

Patel’s experience in the Aware Home helped him refine his understanding of innovation—not just as a technical achievement, but as a meaningful solution to everyday problems. “The Aware Home really informed my view on how to do innovation,” he said. “It’s about solving real-world problems in ways that matter to people.”

 

Helping People Today and in the Future

As the EXCEL program and Aware Home Lab continue to collaborate, they’re not only teaching students how to cook — they’re also contributing to a broader legacy of innovation. With future research opportunities on the horizon, this new partnership and other ongoing research projects across Georgia Tech, such as the Aware Home collaboration with the AI Caring Institute, are poised to further explore how smart environments can support independent living and improve the quality of life.

If you are a researcher, company, or start-up interested in using the Aware Home lab for research, testing, or evaluating in-home technologies, contact Brian Jones, lab director of the Aware Home, at brian.jones@gatech.edu.

The AI4GA program, launched through a National Science Foundation grant and now supported by Google, continues to grow through expanded teacher training and curriculum development. It was initially led by Christina Gardner-McCune (University of Florida), Dave Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon University), and Bryan Cox (Georgia Tech). The curriculum was co-designed with educators and faculty, including Georgia Tech’s Judith Uchidiuno.

Now in its fifth teacher cohort, AI4GA is focused on upskilling educators, many of whom don’t have a background in computer science. Participants in the latest group included science, English, math, and social studies teachers from Georgia, Florida, Texas, and New York.

“We did a really good job with Georgia, so now we’re scaling up,” said Cox, Kapor Fellow in Georgia Tech’s Constellations Center for Education in Computing.

The curriculum introduced the cohort to machine learning, automated decision-making, natural language processing, and other foundational concepts in AI. They also learned about AI applications, including autonomous robots and self-driving vehicles.

Read the full story here from the College of Computing >>

“This visit exemplifies IPaT’s expanding global initiatives,” said Michael Best, IPaT’s executive director and professor with Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and School of Interactive Computing. “We aim to strengthen Georgia Tech’s relationships with select international universities and companies.”

The delegation, composed of Taiwanese leaders from academia, high-tech corporations, and national media, engaged in a robust agenda that showcased Georgia’s growing role in advanced manufacturing, robotics, and startup innovation.

Tunghai University, one of the visitors on this trip to Atlanta, is already working with Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. The delegation had a chance to visit the Georgia Tech Supply Chain & Logistics Institute where Montreuil is the executive director.

The first day of the visit started with a briefing by Stella Xu, director at the Georgia Department of Economic Development, about Georgia’s Quick Start program — Georgia’s internationally acclaimed workforce training program that provides customized training free-of-charge to qualified new, expanding, and existing businesses. Next, the group learned about Georgia AIM (AI Manufacturing) – a statewide effort focused on workforce development and technology adoption for Georgia manufacturers.

Delegates also toured the advanced manufacturing pilot facility run by the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute where they observed cutting-edge AI and automation technologies in action.

A lunch hosted at Tech Square by the Georgia Department of Economic Development and IPaT provided an opportunity for informal dialogue and networking. The group then attended expert-led sessions at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM). These included a robotics dialogue with Ye Zhao, assistant professor at the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and a tour of the robotic research facilities with Aaron Young, associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

The second day started with a visit to the Curiosity Lab in Peachtree Corners. This facility houses Georgia Tech’s Atrium, a specialized facility that offers hands-on workshops, dedicated research facilities, industry partnerships, networking opportunities and more, setting the stage for Georgia Tech learners and alumni to immerse themselves in real-world innovation and pave the way for future breakthroughs in technology and design. 

The afternoon of the second day included a visit to Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X startup accelerator and a pitch from three student innovators who are working to launch a computer vision startup. The group then received an overview of IPaT’s mission and research which included learning about the IPaT Way, a comprehensive approach to people-centered technical innovation. IPaT is exploring new collaboration models to connect research and industry from the Asian region to Georgia Tech research, faculty, and global programs. 

The itinerary also included a meeting with representatives from the Metro Atlanta and Columbus Chambers of Commerce, a tour of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and the Porsche U.S. Headquarters, and even an opportunity to attend the 2025 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. 

The visit underscored Georgia Tech and IPaT’s role as a global hub for innovation and its commitment to fostering international partnerships that drive technological advancement and economic growth for the state of Georgia.

“Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary and industry strengths are extremely impressive,” said CY Huang, chairman of the GeoAsia Foundation, investment banker, and expert in the semiconductor industry. “We look forward to jointly exploring limitless possibilities for collaboration with Taiwan.”

Understanding Resilience:
Morano emphasized that while events like Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton, and other powerful storms cause widespread devastation, they also provide unique opportunities for transformative change. "Communities can take advantage of funding sources available after extreme events from the federal government, private equity firms, and philanthropic organizations to build back better," she said. “The key is having post-disaster redevelopment plans in place to seize these opportunities and build resilience against increasing storm frequency and severity.”

The Role of Zoning:
The conversation also touched on the controversial topic of zoning. Morano acknowledged that while zoning can be politically and publicly contentious, post-disaster scenarios create a window for necessary change. "Often, zoning ordinances inadvertently encourage development in high-risk areas," she explained. “Post-disaster periods allow communities to reassess these policies and potentially shift development to lower-risk areas, enhancing overall safety and resilience.”

Moving Forward:
Morano's insights highlight the need for proactive planning and policy reassessment to create safer, more resilient communities. As extreme weather events become more frequent, her expertise underscores the importance of seizing post-disaster opportunities to implement long-term, sustainable changes.

For communities looking to weather the storms of the future, the message is clear: resilience is not just about surviving the next storm, but about preparing and planning to thrive in the face of inevitable challenges according to Morano.
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Kait Morano is the resilience planning director for the CEAR Hub and research scientist with Georgia Tech. CEAR Hub, a research project supported by Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology, is working with coastal communities to build a future informed by data, guided by strategy, and empowered by knowledge. Their work is organized around three core pillars: environmental sensors and decision support tools, community engagement and planning, and K-12 education and workforce development.

A portion of her interview with The Weather Channel on October 24, 2024 can be found here: https://fb.watch/vvk6ABVAe0/

Set at the UGA Marine Education Center and Aquarium on Skidaway Island, the camp offered students hands-on activities and outdoor educational experiences, where they analyzed real data collected by NASA scientists and learned about community adaptations to flooding. 

Students interacted with experts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Georgia, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, gaining insights into satellite observations, green infrastructure, environmental sensors, and careers related to sea level rise. The camp also included a visit to the Pin Point Heritage Museum, where students engaged with leaders from the historic Gullah Geechee community of Pin Point. The camp concluded with a boat trip to Wassaw Island, where students observed the effects of sea level rise on an undeveloped barrier island and compared these observations with earlier findings from urban environments. Funding from the NASA Science Activation Program ensured that the camp was accessible to all students, eliminating financial barriers for groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields.

Russell Clark, a member of the Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), is CEAR Hub's principal investigator 

Article originally posted on CEAR HUB news. 

This coastal infrastructure and resilience research initiative is called the Georgia CEAR Hub. This new phase of research follows the successful efforts of Georgia Tech’s smart sea level sensors research which was a partnership between Chatham county emergency management agency officials, city of Savannah officials, and Georgia Tech scientists and engineers who have been working together for years to install a network of wireless, internet-enabled sea level sensors in key coastal areas.

The new CEAR Hub aims to advance transformative and inclusive resilience tools that address systemic barriers and enhance equitable access to resources and opportunities. The Hub will promote the resilience and sustainability of vulnerable and marginalized Georgia coastal communities through integrative community-driven research, education, training, and outreach to produce equitable, evidence-based, scalable solutions to challenges related to flooding and sea level rise.

Russell J. Clark, senior research scientist in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, is leading the project. Clark is also a faculty member in the Institute of People and Technology at Georgia Tech. Allen Hyde, assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, will lead a National Science Foundation project focused on youth disaster resilience as part of the effort.

Why We Care

Increasingly frequent floods along the Georgia coast have exposed the acute vulnerabilities of low-income and historically underserved residents to the growing threats of sea level rise (SLR), storm surge, and extreme precipitation under continued climate change. These threats often create severe localized flooding that impacts vulnerable communities and further exacerbates existing inequalities. Communities can benefit from frameworks for transdisciplinary research that integrate knowledge and data streams across social, ecological, and environmental dimensions and advance the design and implementation of evidence-based solutions for coastal resilience.

What We Are Doing

The Community-Direct Spending (CDS) funding for a Coastal Infrastructure and Resilience Research Initiative support the establishment of a Climate Equity and Resilience Hub that promotes the resilience and sustainability of vulnerable and marginalized Georgia coastal communities through integrative community-driven research, education, training, and outreach to produce equitable, evidence-based, scalable solutions to challenges related to flooding and sea level rise.

The Hub has three primary objectives: 1) Establish a Stakeholder Decision Support System that combines a hyper-local water level observing sensor network and a coastal modeling system to provide real-time high-resolution and high-frequency flood data that coastal communities can use to plan for and respond to flood emergencies and design resilience and adaptation strategies for the long-term effects of projected flooding and sea-level rise; 2) to develop a Community Support and Engagement Strategy that includes partnerships with the following organizations: City of Savannah, Chatham County Emergency Management Agency, The Harambee House Citizens for Environmental Justice, Pin Point Betterment Association, Coastal Georgia Indicators Coalition, Tybee Marine Science Center, Savannah-Chatham County schools; 3) Bolster community capacity for engagement in coastal resilience research and planning activities through the development of enhanced K-12 programming and targeted workforce development.

Primary contact(s) for the project: russ.clark@gatech.edu; brittany.king@noaa.gov

Read NOAA’s official kickoff announcement for CEAR >>
Past article: With Recent Funding, Sea Level Sensor Project in Savannah Moves into New Phase

The CEAR Hub lead principal investigator is Russell Clark, senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). Several members of the CEAR Hub team are affiliated with IPaT.

About the CEAR Hub
Coastal flooding, extreme heat, and other climate hazards are growing threats to communities throughout Georgia’s coast. These threats are especially critical for historically marginalized groups, who often face the most severe impacts and have the least ability to cope.

CEAR Hub is a project that joins community organizations, local governments, and educational institutions together to develop the knowledge, tools, and strategies that make our communities more resilient. CEAR Hub partners work alongside members of vulnerable communities to create fair and just solutions to the climate challenges through community-led research, training, and outreach.

Go here to listen to Debra Lam's podcast as she is interviewed by Greg Clark and Jennifer Dolynchuk >>

“IPaT is and will continue to be the heart and soul of Georgia Tech’s research enterprise, bringing a human-centered approach to understanding the impact and potential of a very broad range of technological innovations,” says Best. “It’s the Interdisciplinary Research Institute that most robustly unites the humanitarians, policy experts, and social scientists of Ivan Allen College with designers, architects, artists, ethicists, scientists, and engineers.” 

When IPaT brings together these different mindsets, each with an equal seat at the table, Best says, they can have the greatest possible impact on humanity’s challenges. He cites the explosion of capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) — and the attendant problems that are also emerging — as one example of how this approach puts people at the center of any inquiry.

“We need to put the questions of responsible and sustainable AI first and foremost,” he says. “Any time we’re thinking about the next deep learning algorithm, we need to have all the right people in the room — ethicists; policymakers; cultural anthropologists — experts capable of addressing the whole range of issues we’re seeing.”

Understanding Challenges Around the Globe

Best also believes that a global perspective, as well as getting out of the lab and into the field, are key to IPaT’s future. He wants to expand the institute’s international footprint. He has conducted most of his research outside the United States, primarily focusing on understanding the impact of information and communication technologies — such as mobile phones — on social, economic, and political development. He was also director of research for the Georgia Tech-Shenzhen campus and founding director of the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society in the People’s Republic of China.

“If we try to solve our global challenges from a domestic, blinkered viewpoint, we actually won’t solve them at all,” he says. “You can’t solve a global challenge without understanding the challenge from a global perspective.”

While leading IPaT, Best will retain his appointment as a professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing, where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He says that his students are always in the field.

“My students are conducting research, working with community partners, engaged with civil society or community-based organizations,” he says. “It is always life-changing for them.”

A Living Organization

Since its inception, IPaT has gained recognition for its work in health and assistive technologies, in addition to smart cities and infrastructure technology. Best sees IPaT’s focus broadening to include human-centered approaches to a wider range of technological innovations in areas such as sustainability, entertainment and the arts, and others.

In consultation with its stakeholders, faculty, and staff, IPaT will be looking to identify some of these new challenges and potential new directions over the next few months. Best expects they will look closely at areas where people and technology intersect with political and social justice issues.

In Best’s view, this is very much in keeping with IPaT’s history and character.

“IPaT is a living organization and always has been — rethinking, recommitting, and occasionally pivoting,” he says. “We are identifying what the next generation of research challenges will be. We’re a research community, and we know that every once in a while, you need to embrace a new question.”

Note: The College of Computing's GVU Center merged with IPaT in 2023.

DreamWorks Animation, the Universal Pictures–owned studio behind celebrated hits like Shrek and Madagascar, tapped Alex Powell to spearhead a fix. Powell, a Georgia Tech GVU alum (GVU merged into the Institute for People and Technology in 2023) and his wife Bridgette (Wiley) Powell, are both graduates of the College of Computing majoring in computer science.

Omer Inan, Regents’ Entrepreneur and Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chaired Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, won an Academy Award (Oscar) from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work on a sub-miniature lavalier microphone. Inan is a faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology.

Read more about Georgia Tech alumni accomplishments in Georgia Tech’s Alumni Magazine, Spring 2025.

Enter Jeremy Johnson, who is currently the assistant director of research engineering, in the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech. IPaT is a research institute at Georgia Tech, and notable in that it’s the only part of the university that explicitly includes “people” in its name and mission. They research how people interact with and experience technology, and work to make that experience better for the users. Margaret Wagner-Dahl, a Project Safe board member at the time, connected Project Safe with Jeremy for help with the obstacles the text line was facing, and a 10-year partnership was born!

Raised in McDonough, Jeremy began his time at Georgia Tech in 1994 and simply never left! He went to work for the school immediately after earning his B.S and went on to earn his Master’s in Computer Science while continuing his work. He recently stepped into a new role at IPaT as the Assistant Director of Research Engineering, where he leads the Institute’s engineering team. Throughout his career at GT he's worked on a diverse range of projects, with helping people as a common theme. These have included a panic-button system for social workers facing dangerous situations, assistive technologies for people with communications impairments, brain-computer interfaces for individuals with locked-in syndromes like ALS, mobile apps to support people in early stages of dementia and their caregivers among others. Currently he's part of a research initiative that aims to use AI to help aging adults remain in their homes longer. Jeremy is a father to two daughters and a partner to Rebecca. His strong relationship with his daughters and his partner cemented his passion for Project Safe’s mission as he saw the necessity of organizations like ours if one of his daughters ever found herself in a dangerous relationship

With the modest initial costs of creating this technology covered by gifts from Project Safe donors, Jeremy got to work creating Safeline. The initial version of the software was still phone-based, and used unique numbers and forwarding technology to distribute messages and assign conversations to operators. It was a game-changer! With logistical challenges removed, operators could just sign in and get straight to work with the messaging history available to them for each conversation they took over! Before long, a student group led by graduate student Erica Pramer built a browser-based version which added more functionality and customization options and became the primary method of communication for text line operators. Once the class project was complete, Jeremy took over the responsibility of maintaining and updating the software on a volunteer basis, and has continued that work for nearly 10 years.

Since 2016 when Safeline was introduced, Project Safe operators have held 2,069 conversations with teens experiencing dating violence using Jeremy’s technology. But, the time has come to pass the torch. In the years since Safeline was first created, texting software has become more or less ubiquitous, and the job of maintaining the software has become more onerous. Earlier this year, Project Safe began the transition to a new service, and Jeremy’s time of maintaining the textline is coming to an end. He calls it “the end of an era” and “bittersweet” to be handing over the reins after such a long time, but acknowledges that commercially available software will be easier to maintain and, with his increasing responsibilities, give him more time for his family and relationship.

Project Safe and the entire state of Georgia owe Jeremy a debt of gratitude! Without his tireless work, the Breaking Silence textline could not have handled the volume of texts it receives as the state’s only Teen Dating Violence Text Line. The countless hours fixing bugs, updating software, and responding to problems have directly helped those 2,069 young people who have used the text line access vital support and services. Thank you Jeremy for your tireless work and unwavering dedication to helping us work towards the vision of EVERYONE being safe in their homes and in their relationships!

“When I finished rehabilitation, my doctors and therapist and, most importantly, the insurance company said, ‘For someone with your condition, we feel like you've made all the improvement that you will, have a nice life,’” said Burkhart, who was left with limited feeling and mobility below the neck after a 2010 diving accident injured his spinal cord. “That didn't sit well with me.” 

Hoping even a fraction of hand mobility would increase his independence, Burkhart turned to a clinical research trial on a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to detect movement signals in the brain and send them to a computer to stimulate the arm muscles, bypassing the spinal cord in the hopes of restoring movement.

“I had had four and a half years of never thinking my hand was going to move again,” he recalled. When testing to see if he qualified for the study, researchers stimulated his hand muscles. “I saw my hand move, and that was all I needed to know — I was ready to risk it all for something that may or may not work.” 

Burkhart’s story is one of many that reveal the deeply personal side of neurotechnology research. Centering lived experiences like his is central to the mission of the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS), a new Interdisciplinary Research Institute launching this July at Georgia Tech.

“If we want to build neurotechnology that truly serves people, their voices should be part of the scientific process from the very beginning,” said Chris Rozell, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the many researchers at Georgia Tech working to understand and advance BCIs. “Hearing from individuals who live with these devices helps guide more ethical, inclusive, and effective research. The entire field benefits from inclusive conversations like these.” 

Life With a Brain Implant

Burkhart and three others recently shared their stories live on the Ferst Center stage at “Wired Lives: Personal Stories of Brain-Computer Interfaces, an event organized by Georgia Tech’s Neuro Next Initiative. Their stories gave over 200 attendees a rare, honest glimpse into the realities of neurological conditions and the path to brain-computer interface research.

“I was at a crossroads in my life at 47 years old,” said Brandan Mehaffie, who told his story of living with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. “I was trying to figure out, do I continue with the status quo and watch my career dwindle into nothing? Watch my life with my family, my kids, not being able to go on hikes or family vacations?” 

Mehaffie eventually qualified for deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment, a procedure where a pacemaker-like device is implanted into the brain to provide electrical stimulation. “It changed my life for the better in ways that I can't even tell you.”

When former U.S. Air Force Sgt. Jennifer Walden’s doctor told her about a clinical trial testing DBS as an epilepsy treatment, she jumped at the chance. “The 48 hours after those seizures are 48 hours where you don't want to live anymore.” Walden explained that her response to medication had dwindled after years of traditional treatment, increasing the frequency and severity of her seizures. “I feared suicide. It's something I didn't want to do, but if something happened in those 48 hours to end my life, I didn't care,” she said.

“I am now probably 99% seizure-free,” she beamed as she recalled her response to DBS on stage. “I don't know how I got so lucky in life, but I don't take it for granted.”

Common themes in their stories were resilience, hope, and a deep desire to give back.

“When I joined the study, it had no physical benefit to me, but that's not why I joined it,” said Scott Imbrie, who experienced a major spinal cord injury and participates in a clinical BCI study at the University of Chicago. “I decided to have invasive brain surgery and have electrodes implanted on my brain to help other people.”

A New Approach to Interdisciplinary Research

Timed alongside the InterfaceNeuro conference at Georgia Tech, the gathering offered a rare opportunity for scientists, engineers, and clinicians to engage directly with the lived experiences of individuals using brain-computer interfaces — a perspective often missing from traditional research settings.

“It makes you think about how we ethically conduct research and how we recruit and interface with patients,” said Eric Cole, a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University, who was reminded that many patients participating in BCI research have been on a long, difficult journey before interacting with researchers. “We should remember to take their experiences seriously and respect them. They're giving up something for research — that part we should always remember.”

“Wired Lives” was one in a series of events highlighting the lived experience of individuals with neurological conditions organized by the Neuro Next Initiative, which has served as the precursor to INNS.

“A core mission of INNS is to consider how neuroscience and neurotechnology impact people’s lives,” said Jennifer Singh, associate professor in the School of History and Sociology, a member of NNI’s executive committee, and a co-organizer of the event. “Their stories matter when it comes to the types of science and technology we pursue and how they benefit the human condition. Many scientists and engineers may never encounter people living with neurological conditions outside of events like this. That will be a priority for INNS — to bring the expertise of lived experiences to the research process.”

Ian Burkhart’s lived experience reminded the audience that not every clinical trial has a happy ending. His BCI was ultimately removed after seven years as research funding ran short, taking his newly improved hand mobility with it. Despite this, Burkhart remained positive.

“I'm so glad I was able to take that risk and have that voluntary brain surgery and participate in this type of research because it's defined my life.” Burkhart went on to found the BCI Pioneers Coalition and his own nonprofit because of his research participation. “It gave me a lot of hope for the future, and a lot of hope that these types of devices are going to be able to help people and improve their quality of life.”

This event was produced in partnership with The Story Collider and made possible through support from Blackrock Neurotech and Medtronic.

At the heart of their work is a unique human-AI teaming tournament competition — believed to be the first of its kind — designed to explore how people and AI agents can work together effectively. Unlike traditional AI competitions that pit agents against one another, this event emphasizes cooperation. Participants design AI agents that can collaborate with humans or other agents to achieve shared goals in a team tournament setting.

“We’re interested in using cooperative games as a tool to understand how people and agents can team together more effectively,” MacLellan explains. “This competition is a step toward designing AI that doesn’t just follow commands, but anticipates needs and acts as a true partner.”

The competition, now in its second year and hosted in conjunction with the IEEE Conference on Games, invites participants to submit their own AI agents or join as human players teaming up with others’ agents. With up to $1,000 in cash prizes sponsored by IEEE, the August event offers both a fun and meaningful way to contribute to the future of AI development. 

The team’s research paper about the game, Dice Adventure: An Asymmetrical Collaborative Game for Exploring the Hybrid Teaming Effects, won the best paper award at this year’s International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Georgia Tech Interactive Computing Ph.D. students Qiao Zhang, organized the competition and was the lead author of the paper, along with Glen Smith, co-author.

More than just a contest, the initiative reflects a broader vision. As MacLellan puts it, “Society is moving toward a future where humans and agents work seamlessly together. We want to design for the best possible futures — where AI agents know how to team back with people.”

This vision challenges the conventional view of AI as mere tools. Instead, it promotes a paradigm where agents are proactive collaborators — anticipating needs, adapting to human behavior, and contributing meaningfully to shared objectives.

For those interested in participating in the upcoming tournament competition or learning more, details including dates and registration information are available on the competition’s official webpage: https://strong-tact.github.io. The competition is taking place online during June and July and the results will be presented at the IEEE 2025 Conference on Games, Aug 26-29.

As AI continues to evolve, efforts like this competition are paving the way for a future where humans and machines don’t just coexist — they thrive together as teammates.

About the Research
This research was supported by the Army Research Lab STRONG program awards W911NF2120126, W911NF2120101, W911NF2320203.

Citation: Zhang, Q., Smith, G., Ziyu, L., Dong, Y., Harpstead, E. & MacLellan, C.J. (2025). Dice Adventure: An Asymmetrical Collaborative Game for Exploring the Hybrid Teaming Effects. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. https://doi.org/10.1145/3723498.3723793.

These awards are funded by Sustainability Next. Recipients from this round represent six colleges and 15 schools, with total support nearing $150,000. The grants aim to transform instruction using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), which offer a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.

These awards advance Georgia Tech’s Strategic Plan to connect globally and amplify impact by contributing to global efforts that advance the UN SDGs through education, research, and service. “Over the past several years, these grants have supported the transformation of dozens of courses reaching thousands of Georgia Tech students. Connecting core content to complex, real-world challenges can enhance motivation and learning, while preparing students to advance solutions,” said Rebecca Watts Hull, assistant director of Faculty Development for Sustainability Education Initiatives.All four rounds of grant-funded projects include high enrollment and core courses as well as electives, significantly expanding the reach of Georgia Tech’s sustainability-across-the-curriculum initiatives.

More details about the grant and all of the recipients >>

“This is the flagship robotics conference,” said Seth Hutchinson, a former Georgia Tech professor who served as one of two general chairs for this year’s event. “Most of the robotics researchers you want to hear from or see will be at this conference.”

This includes faculty from Georgia Tech's colleges of Computing, Engineering, and Sciences, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the Institute for People and Technology, and the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines.

ICRA will feature more than 2,000 presented research papers. Georgia Tech researchers authored or co-authored 57, including 18 written by faculty and students from the College of Computing.

In addition to the presented research, the conference will have demos, exhibitions, and robotics competitions throughout the week. The competitions include the Earth Rover Challenge for robot navigation over challenging terrain, the Quadruped Robot Challenges, and the Roboracer Autonomous Grand Prix.

More than 130 robotics companies and research institutes will showcase exhibitions. ICRA also hosts a career fair that Hutchinson said provides an excellent opportunity for Georgia Tech students interested in attending.

“We’re able to attract a lot of vendors. For researcher-oriented conferences, there’s no conference where you’ll see this many robotics companies showing up and showing off what they’re doing," he said.

"We have a massive career fair you don’t get at other conferences, so if you’re a student looking for work, this is a good place to be.”

Hutchinson, the former executive director of Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, said ICRA comes to Atlanta when worldwide interest in robotics is at an all-time high.

Read the full article posted at the College of Computing >>

TechMade is an initiative across the colleges of engineering, business, and design. Supported by the college's deans, it gives students hands-on exposure to product realization, from design to manufacturing, regardless of their major. The goal is to unify the widespread design and creation opportunities on campus while building a collaborative design community for students and researchers across the Institute.

The event featured lightning presentations from several speakers, including Amit Jariwala, Director of Design and Innovation in the Woodruff School; Julie Linsey, professor in the Woodruff School; Mohsen Moghaddam, Gary C. Butler Family Associate Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Woodruff School; Noah Posner, research scientist in the School of Industrial Design; Abigale Stangl, assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design, and Tim Trent, research technologist II in the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).

Noah Posner and Tim Trent are faculty members in IPaT.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE >>

One question puzzling the AI research community is how AI performs when asked about mental health emergencies. Globally, including in the U.S., there is a significant gap in mental health treatment, with many individuals having limited to no access to mental healthcare. It’s no surprise that people have started turning to AI chatbots with urgent health-related questions.

Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new framework to evaluate how well AI chatbots can detect potential adverse drug reactions in chat conversations, and how closely their advice aligns with human experts. The study was led by Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) faculty member Munmun De Choudhury, J.Z. Liang Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, and Mohit Chandra, a third-year computer science Ph.D. student.

“People use AI chatbots for anything and everything,” said Chandra, the study’s first author. “When people have limited access to healthcare providers, they are increasingly likely to turn to AI agents to make sense of what’s happening to them and what they can do to address their problem. We were curious how these tools would fare, given that mental health scenarios can be very subjective and nuanced.”

De Choudhury, Chandra, and their colleagues will introduce their new framework at the 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, April 29–May 4.

Read more about this research here >>

Data visualization and AR/VR researchers at Georgia Tech are exploring how users can interact with news stories through AR/VR headsets and are determining which stories are best suited for virtual presentation.

Tao Lu, a Ph.D. student at the School of Interactive Computing, Assistant Professor Yalong Yang, and Associate Professor Alex Endert led a recent study that they say is among the first to explore user preference in virtually designed news stories. Yang and Endert are also faculty members in the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech.

The researchers will present a paper they authored based on the study at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this week in Yokohama, Japan.

Digital platforms have elevated explanatory journalism, which provides greater context for a subject through data, images, and in-depth analysis. These platforms also allow stories to be more visually appealing through graphic design and animation.

Lu said AR/VR can further elevate explanatory journalism through 3D, interactive spatial environments. He added that media organizations should think about how the stories they produce will appear in AR/VR as much as they think about how they will appear on mobile devices.

“We’re giving users another option to experience the story and for designers and developers to show their stories in another modality,” Lu said.

“A screen-based story on a smartphone is easy to use and cost-effective. However, some stories are better presented in AR/VR, which will become more popular as technology gets cheaper. AR/VR can provide 3D spatial information that would be hard to understand on a phone or desktop screen.”

Read more about this research here >>

Coleman, a recognized augmented reality expert at Georgia Tech, has been working with the PartWorks’ engineering team to solve aircraft maintenance challenges, leading to measurable improvements in labor costs, training, repair quality, turnaround time, and maintenance process validation. This research partnership has led to the development of several patented and patent-pending solutions related to aircraft maintenance.

“I could not have hired anybody with the diverse skill sets that both Maribeth and the Georgia Tech team brought to bear,” said Scott Geller, CEO of PartWorks. “We’ve utilized different and complicated skill sets, sometimes in small quantities, that have made our project work very cost-effective. We’ve used an iterative research and development process that hasn’t had a shocking cost or huge surprises. And the Georgia Tech team has been both easy and fun to work with, too.”

This collaboration has led to PartWorks launching a new aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) augmented reality solution called RepĀR™. Designed for both military and commercial aviation, RepĀR’s augmented reality overlay transforms structural repairs by ensuring accuracy, reducing labor costs, minimizing human error, and accelerating return-to-service timelines. 

RepĀR rapidly captures structural repair data, embedding spatial awareness and real-time validation into maintenance workflows. Novice technicians can achieve results beyond their operational experience, while seasoned technicians experience measurable productivity gains.

“RepĀR exemplifies how targeted computer vision applications can deliver immediate value in aerospace manufacturing and maintenance,” said Shelley Peterson, CEO of Wizard Wells. “By precisely identifying fastener locations and validating tool placement, it reduces rework, minimizes human error, and ensures tasks are performed right the first time.”

PartWorks demonstrated RepĀR at the Aviation Week Network’s MRO Americas, which took place April 8 – 10 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

“This collaborative research with industry demonstrates why Georgia Tech has interdisciplinary research institutes such as IPaT, and why you have research faculty,” said Coleman. “You’re probably not going to be able to get some Ph.D. students to do this work. The focus here with PartWorks is on translation. It’s cross-disciplinary collaboration and translation built on augmented reality work we’ve been doing for 25 years and implementing cutting-edge technology crafted to the right context to support aircraft maintenance.”

“This Georgia Tech collaboration and augmented reality MRO research and development are in conjunction with a multiyear contract we’re working on with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) in Dayton, Ohio,” said Geller. “We’re appreciative of their partnership and excited to be getting commercial interest in RepĀR from both military and commercial aviation OEMs and MROs as well as space industry companies.”

With more than 200 million people suffering from or at high risk for diabetes, India is referred to as the diabetes capital of the world. And the complex challenges faced by people living with the disease suggest the need for a diverse range of technological solutions. 

So, engineers and clinicians from both India and the U.S., including Georgia Tech researchers, met recently at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) in Chennai to identify 10 priority diabetes-related challenges faced by both patients and caregivers in India — challenges that technology could solve in the next decade. The event was organized by IIT Madras’ Shankar Center of Excellence in Diabetes Research (SCoEDR), Emory Global Diabetes Research Center (EGDRC), and Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).

The goal of developing the top 10 list was to incorporate insights from diabetes patients, healthcare professionals, and supportive family members to guide engineers and technologists in identifying key challenges that disproportionately affect people with diabetes and their caregivers. The approach aims to accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship, reducing the time needed to create affordable technological solutions that can help alleviate the burden of diabetes.

Anubama Rajan, co-head of SCoEDR, assistant professor at IIT Madras, and a member of the expert group, said that “clearly defining the problems faced by patients, their caregivers, and doctors is among the most crucial steps in developing technological solutions.”

The Top 10 Problems for Diabetes in India can now be found at stopncd.org. Jithin Sam Varghese, co-director of the EGDRC Diabetes Translational Accelerator, and member of the expert group, encourages anyone interested in developing solutions to work together. 

“There is a great need for engineers and doctors to collaborate at the very initial stages of product development to clearly define the problem a technology aims to solve,” says Varghese. “By fostering these early partnerships, we can accelerate the development of impactful solutions.” 

As a first step in generating solutions, three of the problems identified — inaccessible diabetes education; delayed detection of asymptomatic diabetic foot disease; and the lack of affordable, protective diabetic footwear — were chosen as problem statements for the DiaTech 10X – Diabetes in India Hackathon. The hackathon, which ended April 13 and had over 170 participants from India and the U.S., invited students to collaborate on innovative solutions for diabetes care. The winning teams proposed artificial intelligence-enabled solutions for diagnosing and monitoring diabetic foot disease using noninvasive approaches.

StopNCD.org strives to bridge the gap between problems, research, and real-world translation of solutions, ensuring that the most innovative solutions reach the communities that need them.

“This diabetes top 10 challenge and DiaTech 10X India hackathon were a perfect opportunity to combine the world-class expertise of Emory and IIT Madras with IPaT’s people-centered approach to technical innovations,” noted Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “This initiative represents our shared commitment to global health and wellbeing, from Atlanta to India and beyond.”

The workshop presented three expert-led panels to uncover practical applications of LLMs for engineers, natural scientists, computer scientists, and social scientists-transforming the way they analyze data, generate insights, and advance research.

The workshop was designed for beginners and required no prior experience with LLMs, making it a unique opportunity to explore cutting-edge Al tools that can enhance research capabilities. The event was open to Georgia Tech faculty, graduate students, researchers and staff. 

"The LLM workshop drew in participants with a wide range of interests,” said David Sherrill, Regents’ Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and interim executive director of IDEaS.  “It was exciting to hear how LLMs are being used by students and faculty to accelerate their research in science, engineering, and social sciences."

View the agenda and the thirteen presenters >>

Today, on National Dolphin Day, Google, in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), is announcing progress on DolphinGemma: a foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin-like sound sequences. This approach in the quest for interspecies communication pushes the boundaries of AI and our potential connection with the marine world.

Read the full story from Google here >>

This story features three Georgia Tech researchers involved with the project.

Faculty members in the School of Modern Languages and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs have published three studies examining how language and cultural code-switching have adapted to the digital age, revealing speakers’ fluency, promoting self-expression, and making messaging more effective. Their research is relevant, as the population of bilingual and bicultural people increases in the United States.

By better understanding code-switching in digital spaces, “we can reveal insights into language dynamics and cultural identity among young bilingual speakers,” says Hongchen Wu, an assistant professor in the School of Modern Languages. “Annotated code-switching datasets are also a valuable resource for training and testing language technologies tailored to bilingual speakers — allowing, for example, an AI-assistant that can understand their code-switching with no struggles.”

Read the full article published by Georgia Tech's School of Modern Languages and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs >>

BCIs create a direct communication pathway between the brain's electrical activity and external devices such as electroencephalography devices, computers, robotic limbs, and other brain monitoring devices. Brain signals are commonly captured non-invasively with electrodes mounted on the surface of the human scalp using conductive electrode gel for optimum impedance and data quality. More invasive signal capture methods such as brain implants are possible, but this research seeks to create sensors that are both easily placed and reliably manufactured. 

Hong Yeo, the Harris Saunders Jr. Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, combined the latest microneedle technology with his deep expertise in wearable sensor technology that may allow stable brain signal detection over long periods and easy insertion of a new painless, wearable microneedle BCI wireless sensor that fits between hair follicles. The skin placement and extremely small size of this new wireless brain interface could offer a variety of benefits over traditional gel or dry electrodes.

“I started this research because my main goal is to develop new sensor technology to support healthcare and I had previous experience with brain-computer interfaces and flexible scalp electronics,” said Yeo, who is also a faculty member in Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology. “I knew we needed better BCI sensor technology and discovered that if we can slightly penetrate the skin and avoid hair by miniaturizing the sensor, we can dramatically increase the signal quality by getting closer to the source of the signals and reduce unwanted noise.”

Today’s BCI systems consist of bulky electronics and rigid sensors that prevent the interfaces from being useful while the user is in motion during regular activities. Yeo and colleagues constructed a micro-scale sensor for neural signal capture that can be easily worn during daily activities, unlocking new potential for BCI devices. His technology uses conductive polymer microneedles to capture electrical signals and conveys those signals along flexible polyimide/copper wires — all of which are packaged in a space of less than 1  millimeter.

A study of six people using the device to control an augmented reality (AR) video call found that high-fidelity neural signal capture persisted for up to 12 hours with very low electrical resistance at the contact between skin and sensor. Participants could stand, walk, and run for most of the daytime hours while the brain-computer interface successfully recorded and classified neural signals indicating which visual stimulus the user focused on with 96.4% accuracy. During the testing, participants could look up phone contacts and initiate and accept AR video calls hands-free as this new micro-sized brain sensor was picking up visual stimuli — all the while giving the user complete freedom of movement.  

According to Yeo, the results suggest that this wearable BCI system may allow for practical and continuous interface activity, potentially leading to everyday use of machine-human integrative technology.

“I firmly believe in the power of collaboration, as many of today’s challenges are too complex for any one individual to solve,” said Yeo. “Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to all the researchers in my group and the amazing collaborators who made this work possible. I will continue collaborating with the team to enhance BCI technology for rehabilitation and prosthetics.”

Note: Hodam Kim (postdoctoral research fellow), Ju Hyeon Kim (visiting Ph.D. student from Inha University – South Korea), and Yoon Jae Lee (Ph.D. student) also played a major role in developing this technology.

Funding: National Science Foundation NRT (Research Traineeship program in the Sustainable Development of Smart Medical Devices), WISH Center (Institute for Matter and Systems), and partial research support from several South Korean programs and grants.

PNAS article publication (April 7, 2025, Vol. 122, No. 15): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419304122

Morano emphasized strategies to address the unique challenges faced by vulnerable coastal communities, underscoring the need for investments in resilience and capacity-building initiatives before a disaster strikes. Her contributions were reflected in the committee's final report, which includes recommendations for creating a dedicated statewide office of resilience, upgrading 911 systems, and bolstering building codes for certain types of facilities. These efforts aim to mitigate the impacts of increasingly frequent and severe disasters on Georgia's communities.

The committee's findings and Morano's testimony underline the vital role of research, collaboration, and proactive planning in building a safer and more resilient Georgia.

The study committee’s final report is available here: https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/document/docs/default-source/house-study-committee-document-library-page/disaster-mitigation-and-resilience/disaster-mitigation-and-resilience-study-committee.

Both Banerjee and Shetty are studying computer science at Georgia Tech. Since August 2024, they have been working with Russell Clark, senior research scientist and CEAR Hub project lead, and Kait Morano, CEAR’s resilience planning director, as part of an undergraduate research team implementing processes to ensure the quality and reliability of data from our network of water level sensors.

Read the full article here: https://secoora.org/winners-of-2024-secoora-data-challenge/

During her undergraduate years, Gandy had the opportunity to work as a research assistant on virtual reality projects with Larry Hodges. This experience was transformative as it coincided with a period of significant growth and innovation in computing. The late 1990s saw the emergence of human-computer interaction as a mainstream field with researchers exploring the potential of computers to enhance various aspects of life including entertainment and therapy.

Gandy's work with Hodges involved using virtual reality for immersion therapy to help individuals with PTSD. This groundbreaking research highlighted the potential of computers to provide therapeutic benefits, a concept that was revolutionary at the time. The College of Computing at Georgia Tech attracted numerous influential faculty members during this period including Beth Mynatt, Blair MacIntyre, and Thad Starner who were pioneers in areas such as augmented reality and wearable computing.

Inspired by her experiences, Gandy decided to pursue graduate studies and joined a research lab focused on interactive media. This lab was at the forefront of developing rich, interactive educational and entertainment experiences. Gandy's early career involved building systems and gaining expertise in areas like augmented reality, virtual reality, computer audio, and multimodal interfaces.

In the early 2000s, Gandy worked on augmented reality and wearable computing projects, often using expensive and custom-built hardware. Despite the challenges, she believed in the potential of these technologies to become mainstream. Her work involved demonstrating these concepts to industry sponsors who were initially skeptical about their feasibility as consumer products.

One of the significant projects Gandy worked on was the Designers Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART). The goal of DART was to create an augmented reality authoring tool that non-technologists such as designers, artists, and subject matter experts could use. This tool was built within Macromedia Director, an early software platform that allowed a broader range of people to create interactive computing experiences. By integrating augmented reality capabilities into this platform, Gandy and her team aimed to democratize the creation of AR experiences.

As technology advanced, wearable computing and augmented reality became more accessible to the general public. Innovations in industry led to the development of head-mounted displays and mobile devices with cameras making it easier to deliver augmented reality experiences. This shift made Gandy's work increasingly relevant as companies and startups sought her expertise to develop AR applications and leverage new technologies.

Her growth as a researcher was marked by her transition from a team member to a leader in her field. She gained a deep understanding of the technical aspects of wearable computing and augmented reality, which were still considered futuristic at the time. Her collaboration with Blair MacIntyre, a pioneer in augmented reality, further solidified her expertise and passion for exploring innovative computing solutions.

Throughout her career, she has been driven by the belief that computing can be used for social good and to improve access and experiences for people. Her work has laid the foundation for many of the technologies that are now commonplace and she continues to provide valuable insight in the field of human-computer interaction.

In 2010, the Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC) where Gandy worked became part of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech. This transition aimed to create more substantial interdisciplinary research initiatives. 

According to Gandy, “IPaT focuses on advocating for the consideration of societal impacts in technology development and fostering collaboration with communities to ensure that research has a positive and widespread impact.”

Gandy now holds two significant roles at Georgia Tech. As the director of research for IPaT, she helps catalyze cross-disciplinary teams to solve real-world problems and open new opportunities with technology. She collaborates with external stakeholders, including community organizations, government agencies, and companies to leverage Georgia Tech's capabilities in addressing various needs.

Additionally, as the assistant vice provost for research faculty, Gandy advocates for and supports research faculty across campus. She works to recruit, mentor, advance, and retain Georgia Tech’s world class research faculty community, ensuring that their work has a meaningful impact on society. Her efforts help bridge the gap between academic research and real-world applications, amplifying the impact of Georgia Tech's research on the world.

Gandy's career is a testament to the evolving landscape of computing and its increasing relevance in everyday life. Her contributions to augmented reality, wearable computing, and human-computer interaction have not only advanced the field, but also demonstrated the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. By bringing together experts from various domains, Gandy has helped create technologies that are not only innovative but also socially impactful.

Her journey from a computer engineering student to a leader in human-computer interaction research reflects the broader trends in computing where the focus has shifted from purely technical advancements to considering the societal implications and benefits of technology. 

The Craft Lab is a makerspace supported by IPaT which is designed to promote craft and algorithmic making. The equipment in the lab is particularly well-suited for wearable and flexible electronics systems and can help anyone interested in making soft objects. The lab includes equipment like sewing machines, industrial-grade CNC knitting and embroidery machines, fiber twisting, wire bending, soldering irons, and 3D printers making it unique among Georgia Tech labs to make soft and flexible materials embedded with technology.

Ellisor has worked with arts communities locally and internationally including Georgia, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, Washington DC, New York, Guatemala, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany and The United Kingdom. 

He has been awarded the choreography award at the University of Houston, The Walthall Fellowship through Wonderroot, “Top 20 people to watch in 2013" by Atlanta’s Creative loafing, an Atlanta Beltline Grant in 2014, an artist in residency award with the Lucky Penny in 2015, and the “Best Choreography Award” at the Houston Fringe Festival in 2019 – a festival that highlights dance, theater and visual art. 

Ellisor welcomes the opportunity to engage with students in the classroom as mentor, guest lecturer with respect to choreography and body mechanics, or in leading a movement exercise. If you are faculty or a student interested in having Ellisor speak or collaborate, please contact clintzeagler@gatech.edu.

“IPaT is very excited to be working with Corian Ellisor this year as our first artist-in-residence. We expect that in collaborating with Corian, Georgia Tech faculty, students and researchers will be able to augment and enhance his work with innovative interactive technological elements, said Clint Zeagler, IPaT’s director of strategic partnerships and principal research scientist.

“Our work will be culminating in an artistic interactive performance in the fall of 2025. The goal of this engagement is to both share Georgia Tech’s engineering and technological expertise with the local arts community and also learn from creatives and artists to build bridges back to campus through collaboration with the arts community with Corian Ellisor as our conduit.”

“This year's interactivity event brought together an amazing group of students demonstrating an exciting range of the best people-centered technologies on campus,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT.  “In addition, the Atlanta innovation panel was spectacular and delivered insightful commentary about the optimistic growth and state of entrepreneurship in our city during these uncertain times.”

Jin Kim, a first-year MS-HCI student, presented three projects including a project with the U.S. Coast Guard where she helped develop decision making guidelines related to health care sourcing and supporting resource readiness.

“We get excited about interactivity every year because it’s a great opportunity for our wonderful students to get exposed to the greater Atlanta community,” said Richard Henneman, director of the MS-HCI program at Georgia Tech. “Our students are looking for full time jobs and internships, and this is a great opportunity to talk about their substantial project work with attendees.”

Additional MS-HCI student projects presented included Emily Layton’s sponsored project with Sam’s Club to improve member and associate interactions with their tire and battery centers which resulted in the design of a mobile app. Saba Alemayehu helped redesign a shipping dashboard for United Parcel Service (UPS) allowing small business owners to prioritize features based on their business needs. Ariana Olalde Keller worked on designing new features for an order fulfillment app while interning at The Home Depot to help associates pick and prepare customer orders for in-store pickup or delivery. The new features are currently in development by the Home Depot’s technical team.

“This event is the culmination of what the students work for throughout their time in the [MS-HCI] program. And it's a chance for them to practice their communication skills and network with professionals,” said Carrie Bruce, assistant director of the MS-HCI program.

“Collaborative, industry projects are a keystone of our program specifically because it adds to the experiential component of the education in our program and enables industry to stay connected to us. Throughout the years, we've been tasked with ensuring that we are preparing our students to be ready to help solve real world industry challenges that either are a current problem or design a possible long-term solution.”

As automated tools for job posting, resume screening, and video interviews become more prevalent worldwide, they increasingly influence employment opportunities, often affecting marginalized groups such as women, ethnic minorities, and individuals with disabilities. Addressing bias in these systems demands a collaborative, cross-border effort to design and deploy ethical frameworks, regulatory priorities, and technological innovations to establish a global standard.

This research was conducted by Huaigu Li, Ph.D. student in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Michael L. Best, professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Read the full article in Tech Policy Press (Jan 31, 2025) >>

On November 21, 2024, a team from Georgia Tech met with nine other organizations at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island in South Carolina to work towards developing targeted resilience strategies to cope with environmental disaster events. More specifically, the Penn Center workshop’s overall goal was the co-creation of paths toward building community-led and -engaged, scientifically supported resilience hubs, addressing the unique challenges faced by coastal and inland vulnerable communities in the Southeastern United States.

A common definition of community resilience is “the sustained ability of a community to use available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations.”

Part of the process to build these action research partnerships and resilience plans is to bring together community leaders, government representatives, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers—many of whom are from Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech researchers bring expertise from science, engineering, design, humanities, and social sciences.

As part of the workshop, 15 Georgia Tech architecture students presented their design models for a multipurpose 20,000 square-foot building designed for the Penn Center campus which is steeped in African American history.

Some of the researchers at Georgia Tech attending the workshop and supporting the development of Southeastern community-focused resilience strategies included: 

• Sofía Pérez-Guzmán, assistant professor in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering; 
• Allen Hyde, associate professor in the School of History and Sociology, and faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology; 
• Danielle Willkens, associate professor in the School of Architecture and faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology; 
• Alexander Robel, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; 
• Jennifer Hirsch, director of the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education at Georgia Tech;  
• Valerie M. Thomas, Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems and professor in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy; 
• Joe F. Bozeman III, assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy; 
• Russell Clark, lead principal investigator of the Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub and senior research scientist at the Institute for People and Technology; 
• Nicole Kennard, assistant director for community-engaged research in the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems; and 
• Jung-Ho Lewe, senior research engineer in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

Participating partner organizations in addition to the Penn Center include:

• 7 Dimensions Outreach
• Atlanta Preservation Center
• Center for Sustainable Communities 
• Coastal Conservation League 
• Community Church Atlanta
• Furman University
• Gullah Geechee Futures Project
• University of South Carolina: Arnold School of Public Health, the EJ Strong Program, and the Department of Environmental Health Science
• Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia

This work is supported by a Georgia Tech Sustainability Next research seed grant. The seed grant program is administered by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBIS) in collaboration with the Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI), the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), and the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). The program nurtures promising areas for future large-scale collaborative sustainability research, research translation, and high-impact outreach; provides mid-career faculty with leadership and community-building opportunities; and broadens and strengthens the Georgia Tech sustainability community as a whole.

The ACM SIGCHI best paper awards honor exceptional papers published at the conference. The impact recognition award is given for strong examples of work that demonstrates or has clear potential to demonstrate real-world or practical impact. 

Her paper, “Mending the Fabric: the Contentious, Collaborative Work of Repairing Broadband Maps,” was co-authored by Elizabeth Belding at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Morgan Vigil-Hayes at Northern Arizona University, and Ellen Zegura, professor of computer science at Georgia Tech who also serves as Palacios Abad’s advisor.

Her research paper shows that the repair of broadband data maps in the U.S. involves a complex interplay between competition and collaboration among various stakeholders, mediated by the government. The process disproportionately burdens marginalized groups, who are often tasked with correcting the official records that misrepresent their communities. Accurate, repaired maps are crucial for guiding substantial investments in broadband infrastructure, emphasizing the need for better tools and support for long-term, community-driven efforts.

This study underscores the ongoing struggle for better broadband and the critical role of accurate data in shaping policy and infrastructure investments. The paper calls for a more inclusive approach to broadband map repair, recognizing the efforts and challenges faced by those working in digital inclusion.

CITATION: Beatriz Palacios Abad, Ellen Zegura, et. al. “Mending the Fabric: the Contentious, Collaborative Work of Repairing Broadband Maps” Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Vol. 8, CSCW2, Article 464 (November 2024). https://doi.org/10.1145/3687003

Tim Trent, a research technologist in IPaT (the Institute for People and Technology) with years of experience at Georgia Tech, is passionate about maker spaces' unique role in education and community-building. “Maker spaces are a physical manifestation of Tech Square’s collaborative spirit,” he says. "They bring people together through technology, fostering connections across institutes, departments, and beyond."

Read more about the TSRB labs from an article published by TSQ ATL >>

Read more from the College of Computing's article >>

However, our analysis and research show an emerging trend with local governments engaged in private-sector collaborations – what we have come to describe as “community-centered, public-private partnerships,” or CP3s. Unlike traditional public-private partnerships, CP3s aren’t just about financial investments; they leverage relationships and trust. And they’re about more than just building infrastructure; they’re about building resilient and inclusive communities.

As the founding executive director of the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, based out of the Georgia Institute of Technology, I’m fascinated with CP3s. And while not all CP3s are successful, when done right they offer local governments a powerful tool to navigate the complexities of modern urban life.

Together with international climate finance expert Andrea Fernández of the urban climate leadership group C40, we analyzed community-centered, public-private partnerships across the world and put together eight case studies. Together, they offer valuable insights into how cities can harness the power of CP3s.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>
(The Conversation, Dec 16, 2024)

The winning team members were Jia-Wei Chen, Hsu-Hung Kuo, Ngoc-Ngan Dao, and Ngo-My-Uyen Nguyen. The winning team won $2,000 dollars plus each team member were given ACER laptops and other prizes. The team’s faculty sponsor was Alex Wei, dean of the Industrial Academy at Yuan Ze University.

Their innovative membrane biosensor platform offered a rapid, accurate, and cost-effective solution for disease detection, revolutionizing diagnostic systems, and enabling early intervention for improved patient outcomes and control the pandemic.

CIC is a competition recognizing student innovation and entrepreneurship responding to today’s global challenges and opportunities. Founded in 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia, CIC is organized by IPaT at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

This year, the competition expanded globally to Asia to forge new partnerships and foster more collaborations with universities across the Asian continent. IPaT’s CIC Asia Faculty Fellows helped cultivate team projects and the students so they could showcase their innovative ideas in this competition.

“The CIC students, the competition finale, and the forum all far exceeded my expectations,” said IPaT executive director Michael Best. “All four of the student finalist projects represented the very best in people-centered technologies responding to global challenges.”

CIC Asia is distinct in how it brings teams from multiple countries together to interact and network. Most innovation competitions are single university or country.

The three remaining finalist teams each received $1,000 dollars in prize money. The CIC Asia finalist team projects and team members are shown below:

• BurnUp was a project from the students at Fulbright University Vietnam. Their project aimed to create a product that protects motorbikes' engines from water penetrating through the exhaust pipe during heavy rain and small floods. 
  
  Team members included: Võ Ngọc Đan Khuê, Trần Thanh Tùng, Trương Công Gia Hiếu, Phan Xuân Quang, Trần Nam Anh. The team’s faculty sponsor was Lan Phan, head of the center, Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Fulbright University Vietnam.
   
• GLU@U is a project from a student team at Universiti Putra Malaysia. It is a smart management system for people with abnormal sugar metabolism (i.e. diabetes). It integrates three modules: smart hardware, intelligent data management analysis + decision-making system, and medical passport care management. It uses technologies such as rtCGM, AI, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things to integrate the collection and analysis of relevant user data, the hospital-side SaaS system, and the personal health management app to form a closed loop of digital health monitoring and management inside and outside the hospital. The medical care operation and service system built by GLU@U, as well as the Internet cloud computing platform support system, constitute the full-scene, multi-dimensional operation of GLU@U's "artificial intelligence + chronic disease" intelligent monitoring and digital medical and health management. 
  
  Team members included: Jiao Fenglei, Zhang Hua, Jiang Anqi. The team’s faculty sponsor was Iskandar Ishak, associate professor of Computer Science at Universiti Putra Malaysia.
   
• Guardian Crossing is a project from a student team at Universiti Tenaga Nasional. Guardian Crossing is a safety device that leverages deep learning to enhance indicators aimed in reducing accident risk for pedestrians with limited ability when crossing the road.
  
  Team members included: Nur Zafirah binti Mohd Zaini, Wan Qistina binti Wan Izahan Zameree, Syabil Fikri bin Sabri,Muhammad Danial bin Noor Shamsudin. The team’s faculty sponsor was Nur Laila Ab Ghani, lecturer of infomatics at Universiti Tenaga Nasional.

Global Technology Strategy and Workforce Development Forum

The CIC event took place alongside the Global Technology Strategy and Workforce Development Forum which was also organized by IPaT. The forum featured panel discussions on innovation and entrepreneurship, talent development, artificial intelligence (AI), and sustainable business practices. Close to 200 leaders from industry, academia, civil society, and government across Asia attended the forum and witnessed the CIC students presentations and award ceremony.

Prominent figures from Taiwan’s industry, government, academia, and research sectors participating in the forum included Liu Cheng, vice president of Tunghai University; Chang Ruey-Shiong, former president of National Taipei University of Business; Cai Qiyan, CIO of Taiwan Mobile; Albert Weng, Chairman and CEO Assistant of Qisda Corporation; Nicole Chan, chairwoman of the Artificial Intelligence Foundation; and Kai Hua, Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Taiwan.

The event was also co-hosted by the Lee Kuan Yew Technology Development Foundation, and the Southeast Asia Impact Alliance according to Shelton Chan, managing director for international development, Asia region, with the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Forum was mainly three panels, one on AI and sustainability, one on workforce development, and one on innovation and entrepreneurship. Panelists were a diverse group of university leaders, industry leaders, policy innovators, and included Georgia Tech faculty and alumni.

“CIC Asia and the Global Technology Strategy and Workforce Development Forum event illustrate ways that IPaT continues to grow Georgia Tech’s global influence,” said Best. “The audience was made up of high-level movers and shakers in the Asian technology ecosystem and I think we really impressed them.”

Pictures of CIC Asia and the Forum can be viewed here.

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IPaT’s lab spaces (the Craft Lab and Prototyping Lab) provided both space and technical assistance for the workshop participants. IPaT faculty member Tim Trent manages both labs and provided generous assistance throughout the workshop to build the traps.

The MothBox is an automated light trap that attracts and photographs moths and other nocturnal insects. A raspberry pi (mini-computer) controls a super high-resolution camera and lights, so that the MothBox can be deployed and programmed to collect data at a pre-defined schedule. A computer vision model then processes the images and automatically identifies the insects captured by the trap. Insect censuses are valuable tools for assessing the state of an ecosystem, especially insects’ vast numbers, short lifespan, and proximity to the base of the food chain. 

Mothbox was selected as a 2024 WILDLABS Awards winner.

A detailed review of the workshop was posted by WILDLABS.NET discussing the construction of the moth boxes where participants gained hands-on experience building and testing them.

Read the full workshop article here >>

Watch Andy Quitmeyer's Mothbox lecture >> he delivered as a keynote lecture at Georgia Tech on Oct. 29, 2024 in support of the workshop. Andy Quitmeyer, Ph.D., designs new ways to interact with the natural world. His transdisciplinary work spans scientific and design processes, from material exploration and natural experimentation to artistic outreach.

Winners and finalists for the 2024 Foley Scholar Awards were celebrated at Georgia Tech's hotel and convention center on November 12, 2024. The event was hosted by the Institute for People and Technology with its executive director, Michael Best, serving as the master of ceremonies as each finalist was recognized for their innovative research. James Foley, professor emeritus and for whom the awards are named for, once again delivered inspiring and valuable insight at the conclusion of the evening's festivities celebrating the achievements of all finalists.

"Congratulations to the awardees and finalists who represent the finest that Georgia Tech has to offer," said Michael Best. "Our judges had a difficult task of selecting winners this year because each finalist was so outstanding," said Best.

Congratulations to the 2024 Foley Scholars who are:

• Momin Siddiqui, M.S. student in computer science was awarded $1,000.
• Vanessa Oguamanam, Ph.D. student in computer science was awarded $5,000.
• Charles Ramey, Ph.D student in computer science was awarded $5,000.
• Jiawei Zhou, Ph.D student in human centered computing was awarded $5,000.

The finalists in the master's category were Jordan Brown, Jared Lim, Da Hee (Stephanie) Kim, and Momin Siddiqui.

The finalists in the Ph.D. category were Beatriz Palacios Abad, Adam Coscia, Eric Greenlee, Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, Vishal Sharma, Vanessa Oguamanam, Charles Ramey, and Jiawei Zhou.

A short description of each finalists' unique research along with their Georgia Tech faculty advisor is listed below:

Jordan Brown is a master's student in human computer interaction advised by Andrea Parker. Her research vision is to design and innovate technology that empowers and promotes the emotional and physical wellbeing for underrepresented groups, specifically Black women.

Jared Lim is a master's student in computer science advised by Judith Uchidiuno. His primary research interest is providing computer science opportunities for children from low-resource communities through informal settings or settings outside the traditional classroom.

Da Hee (Stephanie) Kim is a master's student in human computer interaction advised by Mengyao Li. Her research is focused on leveraging robot-mediated intimacy to help couples in long-distance relationships maintain and deepen their emotional intimacy, using an interdisciplinary approach between philosophical, psychological, and human-robot interaction methods and theories.

Momin Siddiqui is a master's student in computer science advised by Chris MacLellan. His research wants to understand how to leverage artificial intelligence to build education technologies that foster a creative, adaptive, and constructionist learning experience for students.

Beatriz Palacios Abad is a Ph.D. student in computer science advised by Ellen Zegura. Her research work lies at the intersection of networking, policy, and human centered computing, focusing on mobile broadband mapping. Her overall research vision is to inform policy and technological efforts in the pursuit of digital inclusion. Specifically, with the goal of supporting localized, community organizing efforts around broadband.

Adam Coscia is a Ph.D. student in human centered computing advised by Alex Endert. His research vision is to develop and deploy responsible and trustworthy AI in education. The advent of generalizable and scalable AI models, namely large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has catalyzed educational communities to begin integrating LLMs into novel adaptive learning tools, such as chatbots for answering questions about course material, or interactive conversational aids for learning and feedback. Yet LLMs have also been shown to introduce potential pedagogical risks and harms, such as responding with misinformation and discriminatory language and biasing scores when used for grading.

Eric Greenlee is a Ph.D. student in computer science advised by Josiah Hester and Ellen Zegure. His research aims to build relationships with historically marginalized communities and to co-design environmental sensing systems that promote their sovereignty and self-advocacy. He also develops novel electronic cyberinfrastructure that provides information about the environment in both a socially and environmentally sustainable manner.

Alexandra Teixeira Riggs is a Ph.D. student in digital media advised by Anne Sullivan. Their overarching research vision is to develop a set of design recommendations and approaches for queering, or critically reorienting, the design of tangible embodied interactive experiences that explore queer history. They are drawing from several prior projects to conceptualize a body of work, looking to how they have each involved archival ephemera, critical human computer interaction, and tangible making, towards reframing histories and empowering queer communities today.

Vishal Sharma is a Ph.D. student in human centered computing advised by Neha Kumar. As a sociotechnical researcher, he studies the design and use of digital technologies in supporting climate justice. He aims to expand the human-computer interaction scholarship on climate justice, paving the way for a future where technology actively supports sustainable development for all. 

Vanessa Oguamanam is a Ph.D. student in computer science advised by Andrea Parker. Her research contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction, digital health equity, and mobile and ubiquitous computing. She conducts empirical research examining the utilization and perceptions of consumer digital health technologies to support mental health among perinatal Black women, assessing the extent to which these tools satisfy their needs. Her insights underscore the importance of nuanced approaches to digital interventions that can accommodate women's unique needs and perspectives with particular intersectional experiences and identities. 

Charles Ramey is a Ph.D. student in computer science advised by Thad Starner and Melody Jackson. His research utilizes wearable and embedded computers, along with AI, to enable humans to communicate with, better care for, and work with non-human animals. He believes that advances gained in understanding the sensory, cognitive, and communicative abilities of non-human animals will create a world more empathetic to all species with whom we share our planet.

Jiawei Zhou is a Ph.D. student in human centered computing advised by Munmun DeChoudhury. According to Zhou, information is integral to every aspect of our lives, from personal decisions to professional activities. Careful and mindful approaches to meeting informational needs are vital to navigating the abundance of available information, critically consuming content, and protecting ourselves from misinformation and manipulation. Her goal is to pursue a research agenda on the role of technologies in shaping individual wellbeing and social ecologies, as well as responsible communication and public education of technological capabilities and limitations.

About the James D. Foley Endowment
The James D. Foley Endowment, established in 2007, is named for James D. Foley, professor and founder of the GVU Center (now integrated with IPaT as of January, 2023) at Georgia Tech. The award was established by Foley's colleagues and IPaT/GVU alumni to honor his significant contributions in the field of computing, his influence on the work of others, and his dedication to the development of new research directions.

Funds from the Foley Endowment are used to support the students and research activities of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), including the Foley Scholars Fellowships, awarded annually to two graduate students on the basis of personal vision, brilliance, and potential impact. Foley Scholars are selected by an advisory board comprised of alumni, current faculty, and industry partners during the fall semester.

“I have spent the last two decades examining the role, the promises, and the peril of information technology in political development and democratic deepening,” said Georgia Tech’s Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “This project’s hyper-focus on Fulton County allows us to have a real-world impact on our own home turf while also creating new globally generalizable methods to identify and respond to online electoral misinformation.”

“The BLK+Cross is thrilled to be working with Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology again on such an important cause — disrupting misinformation and defending our democracy. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw first-hand, the threat that mis- and disinformation posed to public health. Now that voting has been designated a social determinant of health, we are excited to be working with IPaT on yet another project that  addresses social vulnerability in social media, the new town square. As disinformation continues to run rampant, we are battling bots at this point. It is of critical importance to protect the power local communities have over their own digital narrative, as well as protect our collective right to vote,” said Gail Brooks, principal of The BLK+Cross.

The BLK+Cross will work alongside Amanda Meng, research scientist with the School of Computer Science, and Michael Best, who is also a professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, to recruit and train volunteers to be part of a social media monitoring team, research and identify key areas of misinformation, and participate as social media monitors during a high-intensity tracking period around the election day.

This effort coincides with the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, when students led the campaign to register Black voters. The WatchtheVoteATL.org platform empowers today’s students to stay informed about key election issues, political platforms, and policies, by helping them  determine truth from rhetoric. The initiative enables participants to share critical news and perspectives with their peers, families, and communities, ultimately encouraging informed non-partisan voter registration.

About Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology
The Institute for People and Technology's (IPaT) goal is to maximize Georgia Tech’s societal impact through people-centered innovation. They support and connect faculty and students across the entire Georgia Tech campus by blurring the lines between academic disciplines and partnering to translate research results into real-world use. Georgia Tech is at the forefront of science and technology research, and home to state-of-the-art facilities and world-renowned experts who are working every day to find answers to tough problems. IPaT brings together researchers, industry, and other partners to identify technology solutions that will shape our global future. IPaT was created in 2011 to embrace these opportunities and needs, to create a networked research ecosystem of Georgia Tech faculty and industry partners, and to amplify their combined thought leadership and on-the-ground results to create a positive economic and societal impact in critical areas that define much of everyday life.

About The BLK+Cross
The BLK+Cross brings over 20 years experience leveraging ethnographic and digital technologies to better understand and engage BIPOC, youth, and socially vulnerable populations through culture.  

Contact information:
Martine Charles, martine@marcglobalcommunications.com
Mitch Messinger, mitchell@marcglobalcommunications.com
Walter Rich, walter.rich@research.gatech.edu

“Sustainability has been an important and growing theme for Georgia Tech during the last several years as evidenced by Georgia Tech’s Sustainability Next plan,” said Clark. “I’m looking forward to this new role which aligns with the Institute’s strategic vision and goals.”

Clark has been supporting IPaT in various roles for many years and continues with a joint appointment as faculty in the School of Computer Science. He earned his doctoral degree from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and was the co-director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center which supported a variety of research projects across campus.

He was also part of the leadership team creating the Smart Sea Level Sensors project that installed internet-enabled water level sensors across flood-vulnerable Chatham County via a working partnership between officials from the Chatham [County] Emergency Management Agency (CEMA), the City of Savannah, and Georgia Tech scientists.

In addition to IPaT’s research, Clark is working to incorporate educational opportunities for Georgia K-12 students to learn more about resiliency, sustainability, and emergency preparedness. Sharing the latest environmental, economic, and social sustainability research topics are part of his community engagement vision which he has already done by working with Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) which enhances PreK-12 and post-secondary STEM education in the state.

At the college level, Clark, through CEAR Hub, is establishing a new Vertically Integrated Projects Program team which engages undergraduate and graduate students in ambitious, long-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary projects. His resilience and sustainable knowledge expertise has been utilized to teach and co-advise students across campus in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Georgia Tech’s Lorraine campus in France.

“My long and deep involvement with the Georgia coastal community where I live today has created a passion for pursuing research focused on resilience and sustainability,” said Clark. “I hope to build on Georgia Tech’s rich history of sustainability to forge innovative relationships, elevate research and education, and improve the long-term economic and commercialization potential for the state of Georgia with our current and future research projects.”

Her research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, assistive and educational technologies, and health informatics. She designs, develops, deploys, and evaluates technologies to empower people to use collected data to address real human needs in sensitive and ethically responsible ways.

Hayes delivered IPaT’s distinguished alumni lecture on October 17, 2024 in the ballroom of the Technology Square Research Building. Her lecture, “Community-Engaged Research in Autism and ADHD Technologies,” explored the trajectory of her innovative work, sustained community research partnerships, and emphasized key milestones in the development of autism and ADHD technologies by her lab. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a developmental disorder that can affect a person's ability to function in daily life.

Hayes is the vice provost for academic personnel and the Robert A. and Barbara L. Kleist Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She holds joint appointments in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science, School of Education, and School of Medicine at UC Irvine.

Delaney Gomen received the second Governance and Technology Fellowship to work with the Carter Center’s Democracy Program. Muzna Raheel was awarded the first Peace Tech Fellowship and will partner with the Center’s Conflict Resolution Program. 

Gomen’s research interests include democracy and technology, election administration, surveillance, censorship, and digital security education. She is pursuing a Master of Science in computer science at Georgia Tech. Gomen is also serving as a researcher for Assistant Professor Michael Specter, who has a joint appointment in computer science and cybersecurity and privacy. Gomen’s fellowship is funded jointly by the Carter Center’s Democracy Program and Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology. 

Raheel’s research interests focus on Middle East conflicts, specifically major causes, players, and conflict dynamics and utilizing data analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) to map conflict zones, humanitarian interventions, and peacekeeping operations. She is pursuing a Master of Science in global development at Georgia Tech. Her fellowship is funded jointly by the Center’s Conflict Resolution Program and Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.

These research fellowships build on the long-term and ongoing collaboration between Georgia Tech and The Carter Center. 

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Contact: In Atlanta, Maria Cartaya, maria.cartaya@cartercenter.org

The Carter Center
Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.

A not-for-profit, nongovernmental organization, The Carter Center has helped to improve life for people in over 80 countries by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy, human rights, and economic opportunity; preventing diseases; and improving mental health care. The Carter Center was founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in partnership with Emory University, to advance peace and health worldwide.

Visit our website CarterCenter.org | Follow us on X @CarterCenter | Follow us on Instagram @thecartercenter | Like us on Facebook Facebook.com/CarterCenter | Watch us on YouTube YouTube.com/CarterCenter

About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 47,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in Europe and Asia, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1.2 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society. 

Contact: Walter Rich, walter.rich@research.gatech.edu

“Congratulations to this year’s four winning research teams,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “These projects explore sustainability, AI, education, artistic learning, and critical computing. They all advance IPaT’s goal to develop technologies that empower people from all walks of life.”

Congratulations to these winning project teams:

Proposal Title: Making Sustainability Data Public on the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge
Team Members: Yanni Loukissas, associate professor, School of Literature, Media and Communication; Emily Weigel, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences; Alison Valk, Jason Wright, and Charlie Bennett with the Georgia Tech Library; Steve Place, Jermaine Clonts, and Svetlana Sorok with the Georgia Tech Office of Sustainability.
Research Overview: Our research idea is to study the social effects of fostering creative, public experiences with real-time, sustainability-related data on campus with the long-term goal of learning what a resource-conscious campus community might look like. Our approach will be to develop an interactive data visualization prototype for the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge that will visualize real-time water use data in 47 student housing buildings. This visualization will serve as an adaptable research instrument through which to explore the potential for public experiences with data. It will challenge student residents to reflect on and take practical steps to change the environmental footprint of the places where they live. This research project is co-funded with Georgia Tech's Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Proposal title: Computational Design AI System to Empower Maker Educators
Team members: HyunJoo Oh, assistant professor, School of Industrial Design and School of Interactive Computing; Sehoon Ha, assistant professor, School of Interactive Computing; Sabrina Grossman, program director, Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Georgia Tech. 
Research overview: The rise of design and fabrication tools like 3D printers and microcontrollers has expanded maker education from K-12 to higher education. However, access remains a challenge, especially for underprivileged youth. Teachers often struggle to lead maker-centered activities due to a lack of design and engineering expertise, which particularly affects students in low-resource districts where school activities may be their only exposure to creative learning. To address this, we propose developing a web-based AI system that empowers teachers to lead kinetic design and engineering projects. Through participatory design with experienced teachers, the system will assist with project design and offer customized instructional guidance by identifying challenging steps and potential recovery solutions and adapting content to meet teachers’ needs.

Proposal title: Democratizing Creative Agency Through Interactive Technologies and Music Education
Team members: Moeiini Reilly, research technologist, GTRI, and human-centered computing Ph.D. student with the School of Interactive Computing; Paul Brancato, research engineer, GTRI; Nicole Brancato, composer and music educator.
Research overview: Artistic computing learning environments play a crucial role in promoting equity and inclusion in computing by offering diverse opportunities to learn computational thinking through culturally relevant programming. Despite advances in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education, there remains a significant gap in understanding how learners interact with and design creatively in these constructionist settings, as well as how the materiality of computational artifacts influences learning processes, meaning-making, and creative agency. This research seeks to build a framework for centering social and cultural dimensions of artistic learning within computational environments augmented by low-cost, technology-enhanced music education.

Proposal Title: Fostering the Landscape of “Critical Computing” at Georgia Tech
Team Members: Richmond Wong, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Heidi Biggs, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Carl DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing; Betsy DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing.
Research Overview: Critical computing interrogates the social values, normative orientations, and unintended consequences of computing applications, and it is quickly coming to occupy a central place in research and practice among Georgia Tech researchers and their larger research communities. We seek to build a transdisciplinary critical computing research community at Georgia Tech spanning computing, the social sciences, humanities, and related disciplines. Through a working group and symposium series, we will explore the methods, concepts, theories, history, funding, and evaluation of critical computing research. We will investigate approaches to critical computing research that foreground issues of social values and ethics, engage in just and equitable research approaches, explore new forms of communication and expression, and seek to pursue meaningful alternatives to the status quo.

Participants learn about their community's assets and vulnerabilities, engage in virtual mapmaking, and develop green and gray infrastructure solutions to present to local leaders. 

Research support from the University of Minnesota was provided by Nisha Botchwey, dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She was a co-principal investigator in the original NSF grant and previously worked at Georgia Tech. Katie O’Connell, research scientist at the University of Minnesota, also participated in the project and teaches at both universities.

Allen Hyde, associate professor in the School of History and Sociology in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, is the principal investigator for the YARDs project. He is also a research initiative lead for responsible and ethical technologies with Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology.

“When we were invited to participate in the Sixth World Congress for Social and Racial Inequality in Cape Town, we wanted to leverage some existing connections with the project team and youth organizations in South Africa,” said Hyde. “While the goal was to provide educational opportunities for the youth in Cape Flats, the trip was a deep education on the social and historical conditions of Cape Town and South Africa, and lived experiences of Cape Flats youth for the research team.”

Cape Town was chosen for its unique challenges and existing personal connections among some research team members. Mustafa Shabazz, the YARDs project manager and lecturer for Georgia Tech Professional Education, leveraged his ties with the Cape Flats YMCA to facilitate the program. Ricardo De Reuck, director at the Cape Flats YMCA, welcomed the team’s project to engage the children. The team was also invited to present at the Sixth World Conference on Remedies to Racial and Social Inequality at the University of the Western Cape, further solidifying the team’s decision to conduct a program in South Africa. 

Cape Town's coastal location and climate makes it susceptible to both flooding and wildfires, particularly in densely populated areas like Cape Flats. However, upon engaging with the local youth, the team discovered that natural disasters were not their primary concern. Instead, issues like gang activity and crime dominated their daily lives. This insight led to a shift in focus, allowing the youth to develop action plans addressing social issues alongside natural disasters. 

The program, condensed into two days, involved 25 youth aged 12 to 16. Despite logistical challenges, such as limited electrical outlets and Wi-Fi connectivity, the participants actively engaged in drawing meaningful maps and creating action plans. The experience highlighted the importance of flexibility, understanding the community's needs, and pivoting when conducting a YARDs program. 

The team also explored potential collaborations with the YDentity Museum with the Cape Flats YMCA, which delves into the social and ethnic history of the area. This museum could play a significant role in future projects, amplifying the program's impact. 

Overall, the YARDs program in Cape Town was a learning experience for both the participants and the organizers. It underscored the necessity of adapting to the community's needs and the potential for continued collaboration with the Cape Flats YMCA. 

“While Savannah, Georgia and Cape Town, South Africa have many differences in their social and economic contexts, both the youth participants and the research team saw many overlaps,” said Hyde. “Our communities in both countries are often unequal. Not only in terms of infrastructure, access to jobs, and educational opportunities, but also access to parks, green space, safety and exposure to violence, and youth programs.” 

“YARDs helps youth imagine more resilient and thriving communities, whether that be due to exposure to acute climate disasters like hurricanes and flooding or simmering social disasters like a lack of economic and social opportunity and exposure to violence and gangs that becomes normalized due to everyday exposure. Youth are our future. We must ensure that their voices are heard as we plan, imagine, and design our communities. If ignored, then future generations will likely pay the price.”

The workshop was jointly sponsored by Georgia Tech’s Wearable Intelligent Systems and Healthcare Center, the Institute for People and Technology, the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center, and the Georgia Center for Diabetes Translation Research. The aim of the event was to raise awareness and discuss the transformative impact of wearable technologies in promoting wellness and increasing equitable health outcomes.

Attendees at the event included health practitioners, researchers, engineers, and patients who shared experiences using some of the latest wearable health devices. Workshop participants came from Georgia Tech, Emory University, Georgia State University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and the University of Georgia.

Keynote speaker Wei Gao, a professor of medical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, shared some of his latest wearable health technologies combining his chemical engineering background with the latest biochemical sensor technologies being developed in his lab at CalTech.

The second keynote speaker, Tabia Henry Akintobi, professor and chair of community health and preventive medicine at the Morehouse School of Medicine, delivered a detailed overview of her prevention research center program, community health statistics, and touched on health outcomes for different racial and ethnic groups including those with disabilities. She stressed the path forward for wearable health devices included expansion of access to data, approaching technology access through a community-driven social marketing plan, and better representativeness of diverse populations in wearable innovations research.

Poster sessions, panel discussions, and researcher lightning talks were held between the keynote speaker presentations with the event concluding with a reception and networking session at the end of the day.

Agenda and details for the event (archived).

CIC was founded in 2007 by the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). This year, the Asian CIC competition is co-supported by the Shenzhen Georgia Tech Education Foundation, an independent fund in support of Georgia Tech. The competition recognizes student innovation and entrepreneurship with a focus on global challenges and opportunities. Many projects are linked to United Nations sustainable development goals.

Sumpter is coordinating with eight new Asia faculty fellows recruited from IPaT’s strategic partners and anchor universities across Asia. These faculty fellows are experts in their field who have agreed to give advice and mentorship to interested student teams participating in CIC. 

In addition to supporting CIC, she manages IPaT’s lending library allowing a wide range of technology to be used by faculty and students. Devices that can be checked out include: phones, tablets, and other mobile and wearable devices; Arduinos, Raspberry Pi’s and other IoT development kits; a variety of sensors; cameras and media capture devices; virtual machines and databases, home automation hubs and sensors; and a wide range of networking equipment. 

She previously worked for the University of North Carolina in Ashville, Agnes Scott College, and Chattahoochee Technical College. Sumpter is currently a second-year doctoral student at the University of North Georgia in the higher education, leadership and practice program. Travelling the globe is one of her biggest hobbies and she’s planning to visit Panama and Mexico soon.

Launched with funding from the state legislature in 2022, the program was developed collaboratively by Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) and STEM@GTRI, Georgia Tech Research Institute’s K-12 outreach program.

It focuses on developing coding, music, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity skills in high school students in rural parts of the state. During its pilot year, the program served 11 schools in eight school districts in Bartow, Chattooga, Effingham, Fayette, Gordon, Haralson, Liberty, and Walker counties. 

Today, it serves 39 schools and 24 school districts: Candler, Catoosa, Chattahoochee, Clinch, Decatur, Dooly, Fannin, Grady, Hancock, Houston, Jeff Davis, Jones, Laurens, Lumpkin, Macon, Oglethorpe, Peach, Screven, Stephens, Tattnall, Thomas, Treutlen, and Twiggs counties.

Modules taught to students include introduction to coding, advanced coding, principles of cybersecurity, foundations of AI, introduction to robotics, intermediate coding, intermediate robotics, sensors and data science, website design, sensors, and data science.

“This rural computer science initiative has been transformative for Twiggs County schools,” said Mack Bullard, school superintendent. “We find it very difficult to find computer science teachers who are willing to come to rural Georgia to teach.”

He called partnering with Georgia Tech professors “transformative for our school system. Experiences like robotics and coding in class have excited our kids now that they've been able to see what's possible. From our collaborations with other teachers in this program, I can see future student projects in Twiggs County related to agriculture, such as the building and programming of probes. This computer science program has been phenomenal.”

Originally funded in 2018 by a Georgia Smart Communities grant, the Smart Sea Level Sensors Project helps the city and the county measure water levels at specific flood points, like at a bridge over water, to help deploy critical resources to specific affected areas. For example, if a specific bridge is drowned from flood waters such as those resulting from a hurricane, the bridge must be closed so an inspector can determine if the bridge is safe to travel on or has been dangerously damaged by the high-water flood event. Sensors mounted on bridges wirelessly transmit water level, temperature, and air pressure data to servers that are accessible by the Chatham Emergency Management Agency (CEMA). The data, sent to and stored at Georgia Tech, is also available to the public and other scientists for analysis and monitoring. Previously, monitoring a flood event relied on data gathered from a single sea water level sensor buoy placed in a harbor slightly offshore with no clear way to identify if specific infrastructure or vulnerable areas were actually flooded with high water levels.

This new, low cost network of wirelessly connected sensors was created thanks to the work of Russell Clark, senior research scientist in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science and co-director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center; Scott Gilliland, research scientist in Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC), and Peter Presti, senior research scientist also in Georgia Tech’s IMTC. Boris Boeri, a visiting graduate student from Georgia Tech’s Lorraine campus in France, implemented a web interface for debugging and helped with Wi-Fi over-the-air updates. The faculty are all members of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) which supports and connects faculty and students, like Boeri, across the Georgia Tech campus to translate research results into real-world use.

Finding a Wireless Solution
Many of us are familiar with wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular. They work great for their intended purposes, however they require a significant amount of power to work. These proven wireless technologies were not suitable for the Savannah/Chatham project which needed extremely low power wireless connectivity since the sensor units would only use battery power and would be placed in hard to reach areas with large time gaps between checkups and servicing.

Fortunately, Russell Clark, the project lead, knew of a relatively new wireless technology specification called LoRaWAN. The specification is a low power, wide area networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated ‘things’ to the internet in regional networks. The technology also supports key Internet of Things (IoT) requirements such as bi-directional communication, end-to-end security, mobility and localization services.

“We tested and determined that LoRaWAN communication technology was perfect for this use case,” said Clark. His expertise is in networking; he is currently a member of Georgia Tech’s networking research group. LoRaWAN is only four years old, relatively new in the space of IoT/smart cities, and was designed for low power requirements and long range communications.

“For this high-density sensor deployment project, nothing was commercially available. Competing technologies were tens of thousands in cost. In the past, this type of project wasn’t feasible because of the cost. For our project, our LoRaWAN wireless radio transmission of data taken from the ultrasonic water sensor [and temperature and pressure data] doesn’t need to do anything 99 percent of the time. I may only need data sent a few times a day. LoRaWAN was perfect for this use case. And we were able to create the entire unit for less than $300 in materials,” said Clark.

The project had to deploy infrastructure to receive the radio signals, which can travel up to five miles, from the sensors by installing “gateways” around the county. Gateways relay the signal--most were deployed on county and city infrastructure such as placing them up high on existing poles and buildings. One gateway was placed at the top of Savannah’s city hall and one is on the pole of a tornado siren next to a fire station on Tybee Island.

“We worked with the county and city to determine what spots were available to house these shoebox sized gateways. These gateways then connect to the Internet, such as via an ethernet connection available in a building,” said Clark. “Today, we receive and host the data at Georgia Tech, and we have the support personnel and infrastructure like production servers and backup servers to manage the data over the lifetime of this project.”

Testing, Assembling, and Programming the Sensor Unit
Scott Gilliland and Peter Presti, both research scientists in Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC), were pivotal to creating a small, low cost, weather durable unit.

Clark recruited them and their expertise early in the project.

Gilliland did much of the initial unit testing using a breadboard and connecting various candidate parts and sensors to test their effectiveness, durability, power consumption and scrutinize any features relevant to the project’s scope. Accuracy, low power consumption, and durability in an unfriendly saltwater environment were key factors.

“We took several off-the-shelf radio modules to see if they would really work with low enough power and in a harsh environment using D cell batteries. We found many hobbyist modules and sensors were never designed with drastic power savings in mind,” said Gilliland. “We constantly iterated the design—saving power along the way until we reached our design goals.” The ultra-sonic sensors being used measure water levels with millimeter accuracy.

According to Gilliland, the big challenge for this project was exposure to a harsh environment and from his view, adequate power deliver. The team wanted the unit to run on its own using four D cell batteries for at least a year, and ideally, for multiple years. After testing and identifying suitable component parts, Gilliland was also tasked with programming the firmware which instructs the internal hardware components, such as telling the radio transmitter when to send data and when to turn itself off. Boris Boeri, a visiting Georgia Tech graduate student from Tech’s campus in France, further assisted with programming the hardware.

The team also needed to identify a durable, waterproof weather enclosure to house the electronic and digital circuitry to protect the sensor and radio signal device. Clark and Gilliland worked together to identify and thoroughly test a common outdoor plastic waterproof box unit that could be modified to work with the sensor unit design.

Final Circuit Board Design, Manufacturing, and Assembly
Gilliland and Clark did a lot of heavy lifting to bring the sensor design to life, but it was Peter Presti that designed and delivered the final sleek, compact circuit board that fit into the shoebox-sized waterproof housings.

“The design of the circuit board and components is expandable,” said Presti. “We can easily add additional sensors to these units in the future. We also designed the unit so that students at Jenkins High School in Savannah taking an engineering course could examine and fully assemble them using soldering skills and laser cutting equipment sprinkled with a dose of gaining electrical component and microcontroller design knowledge.”

The custom embedded board was built in such a way that high school or college students could program it within an Arduino environment by simply connecting a USB cord to the unit using a computer. Arduino microcontroller boards started in 2005 as a tool for students in Italy to provide a low-cost and easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators. Common examples of such devices intended for beginner hobbyists include simple robots, thermostats and motion detectors.

Presti also designed the circuit board schematics using KiCad, which is a free software suite for electronic design automation. It facilitates the design of schematics for electronic circuits. This opens the door for students, like engineering students at Georgia Tech, to gain access to and modify the circuit board design. Circuit board design software can be prohibitively expensive, KiCad is a free software suite.

The final manufacturing of the circuits boards was coordinated and completed by Presti using an outside manufacturing vendor approved for use by state guidelines.

The Project’s Future for Cities is Bright
“We have secured a new grant in 2020 to do more research on how we might modify this low cost, LoRaWAN architecture to be more resilient in emergency situations such as when power is cut off during a hurricane,” said Clark.

“The team at Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) is well positioned to bring smart city projects like this together because of the breadth of technical expertise we can harness at Georgia Tech. We would have never gotten this additional funding except for the fact that we have a great, skilled team who have already executed this project. The wireless platform technology we’ve created demonstrates significant potential for other cities to benefit from our distributed, low cost sensor network which could enable smarter cities and better decision making.”

The spring 2021 competition was conducted in a completely virtual format with two student teams named winners, and three competitive student teams named as runner ups.

TWO WINNING TEAMS

Team fobbr developed a watchband or bracelet that offers keyless, hands-free access to your work, home, gym, anywhere you need an access card or fob. In today's digitized world, everyone from college students to working professionals need their fobs and access cards everywhere they go. Cities, campuses, and workplaces have started to migrate away from physical keys to digitized cards for building access. Even at Georgia Tech, there is a mixture of access methods: key fobs, physical keys, smart cards, and magnetic card readers. Although digitized keys offer enhanced security, it also provides an additional burden on users. There needs to be a solution that prioritizes the user's experience and ensures seamless interaction with this digitized infrastructure. fobbr is a solution to these problems by offering a hands-free, convenient method for building access. The winning team members are Robert Stout, graduate student in the School of Industrial Design, and Carl Demolder, graduate student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Team fobbr won a golden ticket to enter the Georgia Tech Create-X Startup Launch program this summer.

Team Neurogram developed an online neuroscience/neurology software that is able to read and share EEG recordings and classify epileptiform discharges, making faster the seizure diagnosis. They combined seizure diagnosis, something that is done by visual inspection, with fast and accurate artificial intelligence technology to decrease the time needed for the patient receive the right treatment and stop seizing. If a seizure lasts more than 30 minutes the risk of death goes from 2.6% to 19%, so there is an urgent need of a fast detection. The diagnosis is still made by a human, but Neurogram can highly decrease the time needed for the doctor to do the diagnosis. The winning team members are Daniele Gavetti De Mari, an undergradaute student studying neuroscience, and Phillip M. Kinney, an undergraduate studying computer science.

THREE RUNNER UP TEAMS

Team Jamiable developed an online support community for musicians. Jamiable is proposed to offer musicians the ability to connect with others online, making profiles to share their interests with friends and writing in public and private forums related to musical, social, and mental health-related discussion. Team members include Jason Smith, Ashvala Vinay, Clara Kennedy, Evan Mi, and Rohit Puntambekar.

Team Nutriful developed an application that make healthy eating easier for its users by accommodating to their culture, preferences, and motivations. Team members include Anunoy Dussa, Neha Deshpande, Saira Poonnen, Zida Wang, and Ziwei Wang.

Team Seedling developed an iOS app for plant owners of all levels that helps organize and monitor the care of your house plants. Team members include Daniella Ruzinov, Ben Melnick, and Joshua McCord.

The Georgia Tech Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC), now in its 14th year, is dedicated to helping students create and showcase innovative and viable products and experiences with the support of campus and industry resources and guidance. CIC categories are determined by community and industry partners and winning entries include a viable end-to-end prototype which operates on converged services, media, networks, and/or platforms.

This year’s convergence areas (competition project focus areas) included the Georgia Tech strategic plan, the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, health and well-being, shaping the human frontier, platforms and services for socio-technical systems, smart cities and inclusive innovation.

Elizabeth Mynatt, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and distinguished professor in the College of Computing, was awarded Georgia Tech’s Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award.

Mynatt is also a Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where she has been a faculty member since 1998. As the executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology, she leads a research institute that spans the multidisciplinary breadth of Georgia Tech with the purpose to amplify Tech’s leadership in complex social systems such as healthcare, education, media, and humanitarian systems. Mynatt is the past director of the GVU Research Center, an interdisciplinary research center based in the College of Computing whose mandate is to foster research excellence across Georgia Tech at the intersection of people and computation.

Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was awarded Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Development Award.

Keskinocak is an IPaT faculty member and is the co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Keskinocak's research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling—including extensive Covid-19 research.

Omar Inan, associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award.

Inan, a faculty member of IPaT, was recently awarded an Academy Award for Technical Achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (popularly known as the Oscars®). Inan’s research focuses on wearable health monitoring technologies; designing clinically relevant medical devices and systems; and translating them from the lab to patient care applications. One strong focus of his research is in developing new technologies for monitoring chronic diseases at home, such as heart failure.

Some of this year’s demonstration topics included battery fuel cells, nanotechnology, DNA, immunoengineering, chemistry, engineering, superconductivity levitation, wastewater treatment, aerospace, space outreach, virtual reality, biology, robotics, computing, 3D printing, paper making, and much more.

A parent attending from Peachtree City said, “we’ve discovered our son has an affinity for math and science. He’s handling tenth grade science level coursework, yet he’s only in the seventh grade and can understand math formulas ahead of his age group. We brought him here to expose him to a variety of technologies and advanced equipment that he won’t see or be exposed to in his middle school. The staff and professors here have been very kind to show him how to use some of the equipment we’ve seen. And his eyes have gotten bigger all day because of these interactions.”

Virginia Howell, director of the Roberts C. Williams Museum of Paper Making in the Renewable Bioproducts Institute at Georgia Tech said, “the paper museum is delighted to be part of the Georgia Tech Science and Engineering Day. It's a great opportunity for people to learn more about the paper museum and get hands-on experience in making a sheet of paper to take home. We offer workshops, classes, and tours to students across the state of Georgia. Kids have been lined up all day to participate at our tables today.”

Demonstrations included how to extract DNA, seeing LIDAR in action, experiencing heat sensing sensors, how x-rays are used, viewing scanning electron microscopes, playing a virtual reality game, experiencing chemical reactions, watching 3D printing, making slime, showing atom-level nano materials in synthesized materials, neuroscience demos, liquid nitrogen experiments, and many more.

Presentation areas were hosted by the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, and the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences who provided valuable space in their buildings to house demonstrations. The Ford Environmental Science & Technology Building and Molecular Science & Engineering Building also donated space for demonstrations.

Another tour offering during Science and Engineering Day was the Flowers Invention Studio at Georgia Tech which offers more than 5,000 square feet of industrial makerspace equipment.

“We are the largest student-run maker space in the nation,” said Lillian Tso, president of the Invention Studio and a fourth-year mechanical engineering student. “We house industrial grade equipment for prototyping and manufacturing—we support anything that students want to build. We're open for all students of all majors of all years. They can use our equipment for free which includes CNC machines, more than 50 3D printers, waterjets, laser cutters, and many other professional-level tools. This is our first year participating in the Georgia Tech Science and Engineering Day. We wanted to do a lot more outreach to the Georgia Tech campus and the greater Atlanta community."

Lucas Garza, president-elect of the Invention Studio, added, “we’ve had a busy day offering tours of our studio throughout the festival.”

Located in the mezzanine of the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, Ethan Sirak, a fourth-year aerospace student with the Georgia Space Grant Consortium, was providing kids with exposure to space facts and allowing them to perform crafts related to planets and space. The consortium is an organization under NASA which aims to promote STEM exposure to kids of all ages. He also assists with the Aerospace Engineering Outreach Program. He was partnered at his hands-on learning table with Bill McNutt Jr., a senior aerospace engineering student.

A young participant from Suwanee, Georgia, said, “I want to go to school at Georgia Tech because of aerospace engineering. I want to go on good adventures in future space flight and design things.”

His mom, a sixth-grade science teacher added, “I love coming to science fairs to get new ideas for my students and I love to bring my family because we just have a great time. This is our very first science fair here at Georgia Tech. We've been to ones in north Georgia because that's pretty close to where we live. But when we saw this was available, we're like, yeah, we're coming down to Tech for this today—and having a great time.”

While attendees were able to get a peek into one of the nation’s most research-intensive universities, the event also allowed the many researchers and students participating the opportunity to share their science and engineering work with the public.

One of the more unique tables was manned by Alison Reynolds, an instruction archivist with research services in the Georgia Tech library. She was displaying a selection of unique items from Georgia Tech’s science fiction archives and special collections. She said, “we’ve been teaching with science fiction since 1971 and our collection is now one of the largest science fiction collections in the United States. We wanted to display part of our special collection.”

“I had several Georgia school systems reach out to me that were interested in attending this event,“ said Leslie O 'Neill, education outreach manager with the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC) at Georgia Tech. “Georgia Tech plays a vital part in its community. We wanted to showcase the campus; the student, faculty and staff research; and the amazing science and engineering being done. We’ve had a fantastic turnout this year for this event.”
 

The keynote speaker this year was Thomas Reardon, vice president and head of neural interfaces at Meta Reality Labs. Reardon is a highly regarded neuroscientist and entrepreneur who founded CTRL-labs which was acquired by Meta (Facebook) in 2019. He currently leads a team of computational neuroscientists and biotech engineers working to connect neurons to machines via a novel non-invasive neural interface technology. Reardon’s talk topic for this year’s annual Industry Innovation Day was “Consumer Neural Interfaces: View from Meta Reality Labs.” In addition to providing an informative lecture about neural technology, he briefly displayed some of the capabilities of his Meta team’s wrist-mounted, non-invasive device that was able to translate neuro hand activity into its corresponding robotic hand movements.

“Our undergraduate degree in neuroscience is one of the Institute’s most popular degrees,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president for interdisciplinary research at Georgia Tech, who gave several introductory remarks. “The neuroscience area integrates many disciplines across campus such as the arts, humanities, social science, computer science, engineering, business, design, and the basic sciences and is a great example of the true integration of interdisciplinary research in many forms across Georgia Tech. We are particularly grateful for the participation today of companies and other organizations that collaborate with the Georgia Tech community of researchers.”

Leigh McCook, interim executive director of IPaT, emphasized the need to have dialogue and conversations between industry partners and community partners with Georgia Tech researchers to develop supportive research projects and create greater impact in the area of the human technology frontier.

“The neuro space and the IPaT space are natural partners for each other,” said Chris Rozell, professor and Julian T. Hightower Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This is a perfect day to come together and talk about what the human frontier looks like. Georgia Tech hired its first neuro engineer more than 30 years ago long before it was cool to be an engineer studying neuro. Today, we have more than a 100 faculty spanning six colleges studying neuro-related topics with the additional involvement of Emory University and Georgia State University. We’ve had an incredible trajectory over the last decade and we’ve fostered a growing and active community.”

Following Reardon’s keynote were two interactive panel sessions. The first panel was focused on “brain computer input and output” was led by moderator Michelle LaPlaca, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her research interests are in neurotrauma, injury biomechanics, and neuroengineering as they relate to traumatic brain injury.

The panelists were:

Melody Moore Jackson, professor in the School of Interactive Computing
Omer Inan, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carlos Bremer, president North America Division - Global VP of Knowledge at brain4care
Isaac Clements, CTO and co-founder of BioCircuit Technologies
The second panel was focused on the “future of cognitive and psychological aids” and was moderated by Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research at the Institute for People and Technology where her work has been focused on the intersection of technology for mobile/wearable computing, augmented reality, AI, human computer interaction, healthcare, assistive technology, and gaming.

The panelists were:

Jennifer R. DuBose, director of the SimTigrate Design Lab
Tansu Celikel, chair of the School of Psychology
Deborah Backus, vice president of research and innovation, Shepherd Center
Barbara Olasov Rothbaum, director of the Emory Healthcare veterans program and chair in neuropsychopharmacology, Emory University School of Medicine
“I am really pleased with the connections we were able to foster today,” said Clint Zeagler, co-director of strategic partnerships for IPaT and principal research scientist. “Key to translational and impactful research outcomes are transdisciplinary collaboration across campus and with industry and corporate partners. Events like this with both academic and industry experts allow for deep conversations and spark interesting and innovative projects.”

He holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab. He received his computer science and engineering bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Both Chaouki Abdallah, executive vice president for research, and I see a bright future for IPaT with professor Michael Best coming onboard as executive director of IPaT,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president for interdisciplinary research at Georgia Tech. “Mike is our first Interdisciplinary Research Institute executive director with a primary faculty appointment in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. He brings his deep experience integrating technology and social sciences to this new role. With the rapid deployment of AI in daily life, IPaT – now combined with the GVU Center – plays a critical role in addressing not only how people interface with new technologies, but also how people should control and direct technology to meet the needs of diverse communities.”

“I’m especially appreciative of the search committee members and of professor Pinar Keskinocak for chairing the search. Together they brought forward an excellent slate of candidates. The IPaT community came out in force to meet with our four finalists and provided valuable feedback. In serving as interim executive director since January 2022, Leigh McCook has provided strong leadership and supported the merged IPaT and GVU community. Leigh will serve in this role until August 1, after which she will return to her earlier roles in IPaT and GTRI.”

Best serves as associate editor for global computing with Communications of the ACM and co-founder and editor-in-chief emeritus of the journal Information Technologies and International Development. Best has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in books, journals, and conferences since joining Georgia Tech in 2003. He has delivered more than 100 invited and keynote lectures across the USA and internationally.

While research faculty at MIT, he served as a research fellow in the Center for International Development at Harvard University, conducting policy, strategy, and technical research in information and communication technologies for social and economic development.

In 2015, Best took a leave of absence from Georgia Tech to become founding director of the UNU Institute on Computing and Society. UNU-CS was the “people and technology” research arm of the United Nations, and Best was responsible for strategic development, government relations, research visioning, budget, and administrative supervision. As director, he recruited, hired, and supervised over 40 staff and researchers and managed an annual budget of $4 million.

“I am thrilled to take on this leadership role with IPaT,” said Best. “The intersection of people and technology – where science and engineering connect with societies and communities – defines today’s greatest challenges and opportunities. AI technologies or mRNA vaccines are as much about people, society, and policy as they are about neural networks or vaccine systems. IPaT’s ongoing purpose is to strengthen Georgia Tech’s leading research at this intersection.”

The Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) brings together researchers across Georgia Tech to support world-class research, engage students, and collaborate with industry, government, and nonprofit partners. IPaT’s goal is to maximize Georgia Tech’s societal impact through people-centered innovation. IPaT was created in 2011 to embrace opportunities and needs to create a networked research ecosystem of Georgia Tech faculty and industry partners, and to amplify their combined thought leadership and on-the-ground results to create a positive economic and societal impact in critical areas that define much of everyday life.

Michael Best will be the second executive director of IPaT, succeeding the founding director Elizabeth Mynatt.

The seven selected Georgia Tech students for IPaT’s 2023 summer research internship program are:

Ritu Atreyas, junior majoring in computer science
Corinne Cutts, sophomore majoring in psychology
William Dyches, junior majoring in electrical engineering
Alexa Hanna, senior majoring in computer science
Geehoon Jung, junior majoring in computer engineering
Amrita Manickandan, junior majoring in computer science
Suchir Sur, junior majoring in mechanical engineering
Summer research projects available included:

* Aware Home: seeking students interested in evaluating, deploying, and integrating home sensing and automation tools and services to support research and demonstrations.

* Aware Home SmartBathroom Fixture Automation: seeking students interested deploying and configuring a home robotic research platform in the home to support research, academic, and demonstration capabilities. Read more about this project here.

* Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub: seeking students who are interested in working with diverse project teams addressing flooding on the Georgia coast. We are looking for application software developers, IoT sensor experience (e.g.Arduino), data analytics, community outreach and engagement, K-12 summer camp leads, etc.

* Esports User Research: seeking students for work in one of four projects relating to 1) novel fan experiences in mixed reality, 2) teamwork interventions to improve esport athlete performance, 3) health and safety support for esports athletes, and 4) scholastic gaming to support STEAM engagement in at-risk K-12 students."

* Augmented/Virtual Reality and Wearable Computing: seeking students interested in performing research and development in the areas of augmented/virtual reality and wearable computing. We are creating innovative systems to help diverse populations in the areas of work, healthcare, education, and entertainment.

* CellWatch is a mobile app that allows you to record, view, and analyze cellular connectivity. This app is part of a research project focused on measuring and characterizing the availability and quality of mobile broadband in rural areas. Through this project we hope to collaborate with rural and tribal communities in the US in order to inform policy and technological changes in the pursuit of digital inclusion. Building a mobile app (Android) that can record, view and analyze cellular connectivity. We are initially building a mobile app (Android) that can record, view and analyze cellular connectivity. It's a cellular speed test app. Students would help with Android, Kotlin software development for building this app. Students will also help to develop a web dashboard app; Javascript, React experience is needed and familiarity with integrating Google Maps in apps would help as well.

* Other projects may be available
 

Ryan Elchahal from Westminster High School
Nekele Hayes from Campbell High
Morgan Hildebrand from Harrison High School
Harrison Lueder from Maynard Jackson High School
Lilith (Ace) Magerko from Dekalb School of the Arts
Nekele Hayes is a high school junior and while the other students are seniors in high school.
Nathan Williams, a Dekalb County school teacher, was onsite helping to support the program.

The goal of IPaT’s high school summer internship program is to expose high school students interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to ongoing research at the Institute for People and Technology. Project areas will include Esports, augmented reality/cognitive aid design, and technologies for aging in place (Aware Home).

The team of IPaT faculty and staff members supporting the program includes:

Maribeth Coleman – Director of Research (IPaT)/Principal Research Scientist
Scott Robertson – Senior Research Scientist
Brian Jones – Principal Research Engineer/Director of the Aware Home
Laura Levy – Senior Research Scientist
Clint Zeagler, Senior Research Scientist
Tim Trent, Research Technologist II
Noah Posner, Research Scientist II
Kala Jordan, Research Technician II
Cynthia Moore, Assistant Director-Business Operations
Marcia Chandler, Administrative Operations Coordinator
Christine Robinson, Senior Administrative Professional
Leigh McCook, interim Executive Director, IPaT

At the end of the internships, students presented their projects in the large Georgia Tech Research Institute auditorium on July 21. Morgan Hildebrand, Harrison Lueder, and Ace Magerko presented their Fidget Focus project. The aim of their project was to boost productivity in virtual meetings using a browser-specific Chrome extension for distraction free collaboration. Nekele Hayes and Ryan Elchahal presented their Vidsight project. An iOS app for life skills training and appliance education using machine learning and computer vision.

“Congratulations to this year’s grant awardees, which bring together a diverse set of scholars advancing important new lines of interdisciplinary inquiry,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “The funded projects in the arts, assistive healthcare, AI, and beyond will further Georgia Tech’s impact at the intersections of people and technology.”

The goal of the IPaT/GTRI co-sponsored research and engagement grants for 2023-2024 is to promote research activities involving faculty and students from many disciplines represented in IPaT. Five winning projects were selected based on their early-stage research which have a high probability of leading to extramural funding and include a strong interdisciplinary component. Engagement grants are also designed to foster new engagements and collaborations, whether internal or external to Georgia Tech.

The goal of the IPaT/IDEaS co-sponsored research include identifying prominent emerging research directions on the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), shaping IDEaS future strategy in this initiative area, and building an inclusive and active community of Georgia Tech researchers. Proposals could include external collaborators, identifying and preparing groundwork for competing in large-scale grant opportunities in AI, and AI use in other research fields.

Congratulations to the winning project teams listed below:

Proposal title: Artificial Intelligence Based Abstract Review Assistant (AIARA)
Team members: Michael Cross, research scientist, GTRI; Paula Gomez, senior research engineer, GTRI; Mark Riedl, professor, associate director of the Georgia Tech Machine Learning Center, School of Interactive Computing
Award and sponsors: $20,000 (IPaT/GTRI)
Overview: Scientific committee members are promoting the use of artificial intelligence tools such as Google’s BARD and OpenAI’s Chat GPT to help with the blind review process to support the peer review process such as articles submitted for annual science-related conferences. Considering that the peer review process is made up of well-structured tasks that include analysis of a set number of abstract components (title, keywords, structure, outcomes, references) or paper components (the introduction, methods, results, discussion, length, clarity and structure), peer review is an excellent candidate for trained AI to address topics such as duplicate submissions, self-plagiarism, incomplete reviews, comment quality assessment, and the overall standardization of scores for the final selection of articles.

Proposal title: Toward Fairer Diagnosis and Care of Type 2 Diabetes: A Long-Term and Pipeline-Level View
Team members: Gabriel Garcia, assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Juba Ziani, assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Jovan Julien, postdoctoral fellow, Harvard Medical School
Award and sponsors: $16,034 (IPaT)
Overview: Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is one of the most common chronic diseases in the United States, affecting about 10% of Americans. While T2DM is irreversible, its early disease stages – i.e., pre-diabetes – are reversible. Accordingly, early screening, detection, and treatment are critical to reducing the rates of progression to T2DM and mitigating the adverse effects of T2DM among those who already have it. Yet, in the United States, T2DM can often go undetected until its later stages with each missed detection stage leading to worsening health outcomes and increasing financial burden. Further, people from disadvantaged and underserved groups often face lower access to care, leading to more missed detection and greater downstream disease burden. In this research, our goal is to build a mathematical model to optimize investments across screening and treatment resources while reducing disparities across disadvantaged populations.

Proposal title: ASTRO! - Manysourcing the Design and Behavior of Future Robotic Guide Dogs
Team members: Bruce Walker, professor, School of Psychology and School of Interactive Computing
Award and sponsors: $15,375 (IPaT)
Overview: ASTRO! is an interdisciplinary collaborative project to engage many people in the ideation and creative design of future robotic guide dogs. As the technology and engineering advance towards a robotic assistant, we also must consider design and human-robot interaction issues. We will ask many people--through interviews, focus groups, and surveys--what capabilities a robotic guide should have. We will also ask how they should look and feel. We will consider how they will behave. And finally, we will investigate how humans and robotic assistants will communicate. Students in many classes at Georgia Tech and beyond will study various aspects of this research and design challenge. We will also host a weekend “design-a-thon” for ideating and brainstorming robot designs and interaction patterns, and crafting up all kinds of prototypes and mockups. The outcomes of this project will influence the design of robotic assistants, and more broadly will help us design advanced technology so it is accepted into society.

Proposal title: Data-Driven Platform for Transforming Subjective Assessment into Objective Processes for Artistic Human Performance and Wellness
Team members: Milka Trajkova, research scientist, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Brian Magerko, professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication
Award and sponsors: $15,000 (IPaT/IDEaS)
Overview: Artistic human movement at large, stands at the precipice of a data-driven renaissance. By leveraging novel tools, we can usher in a transparent, data-driven, and accessible training environment. The potential ramifications extend beyond dance. As sports analytics have reshaped our understanding of athletic prowess, a similar approach to dance could redefine our comprehension of human movement, with implications spanning healthcare, construction, rehabilitation, and active aging. Georgia Tech, with its prowess in AI, HCI, and biomechanics is primed to lead this exploration. To actualize this vision, we propose the following research questions with ballet as a prime example of one of the most complex types of artistic movements: 1) What kinds of data - real-time kinematic, kinetic, biomechanical, etc. captured through accessible off-the-shelf technologies, are essential for effective AI assessment in ballet education for young adults?; 2) How can we design and develop an end-to-end ML architecture that assesses artistic and technical performance?; 3) What feedback elements (combination of timing, communication mode, feedback nature, polarity, visualization) are most effective for AI- based dance assessment?; and 4) How does AI-assisted feedback enhance physical wellness, artistic performance, and the learning process in young athletes compared to traditional methods?

Proposal title: Voice+: Locating the Human Voice in a Technology-Driven World
Team members: Andrea Jonsson, assistant professor, School of Modern Languages; Stuart Goldberg, associate professor, School of Modern Languages
Award and sponsors: $3,800 (IPaT)
Overview: The Voice + Research Lab is an Interdisciplinary Voice Studies Lab that explores the human voice from a variety of perspectives and integrates knowledge and methodologies from different disciplines. It encompasses a wide range of topics related to the voice, including vocal production, vocal health, cultural and historical aspects of vocal expression, and the artistic and expressive use of the voice. Interdisciplinary voice studies aim to provide a holistic understanding of the voice and its multifaceted aspects, fostering collaboration among experts in various fields to explore sound and structures of the human voice.

Clark is the lead principal investigator for the Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub. This is a project that joins community organizations, local governments, and educational institutions together to develop the knowledge, tools, and strategies that make our communities more resilient. CEAR Hub partners work alongside members of vulnerable communities to create fair and just solutions to climate challenges through community-led research, training, and outreach.

The students’ 2024 summer research projects included:

• Grace Littler, a junior majoring in architecture, worked with Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab. She helped gathered data for a NIH proposal from New Horizons, a group in Atlanta, studying sleep and environment issues. She also participated in research activities related to neurorehabilitation centers.
   
• Seongjin Kim, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering, worked with Celeste Mason, research scientist at IPaT, and Thad Starner, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, on a passive haptic learning and rehabilitation project related to piano playing. 
  
  According to Kim, “playing musical instruments is beneficial for people's mental health and cognitive abilities, but it is also a time-consuming process. The Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) project aims to help people learn piano faster through wearable gloves that use actuator-caused haptic vibrations to stimulate the cutaneous sensory mechanoreceptors in the user's hands. This makes technical practice sessions more efficient as PHL gloves build up procedural memory, and it is a more efficient use of time as the learning process becomes passive, meaning that users may perform other tasks while wearing the gloves.”
  
  Over the summer, the PHL gloves transitioned from using wired connections to flexible PCBs to enhance the glove's electromechanical integrity, and the flexible PCB design and assembly procedure has been simplified. Moreover, an ergonomic form factor was developed to complement the new circuitry.
   
• Shreya Sasmal, a junior majoring in computational media, worked with Kala Jordan, research scientist in IPaT, and Maribeth Coleman, director of research for IPaT. Her project’s goal was to digitize instruction manuals focused on mechanical repair and maintenance to create a more efficient repair process and speed up knowledge transfer between workers.
   
• Nathan Lin, a senior majoring in computational media, worked with IPaT scientists Peter Presti, senior research scientist, and Brian Jones, senior research engineer, on the Aware Home smart bathroom project. Lin programmed and built a full-stack application that can report data of deployable smart toilet seats for occupational therapists to review data.
   
• Sameer Arora, a sophomore majoring in computer science, worked with Peter Presti, senior research scientist, and associate professor, Rosa Arriaga in the School of Interactive Computing, on a prolonged exposure therapy iOS mobile app. He programmed and built the Prolonged Exposure Collective Sensing System for PTSD on iOS which was already available on Android devices. This programming project was funded by the National Science Foundation.
   
• Siddharth Jain, a undergraduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, who worked with Matt Sanders, director of research computing and data at Georgia Tech. Jain architected “Control Point,” a smart interface between legacy operating system built devices and smart environments. Control Point is a component for secure data transfer between legacy devices and modern systems, acting as a bridge that ensures efficient data flow and compliance with industry standards.
   

• Matthew Perry, a junior majoring in computer engineering, worked with Brian Jones, senior research engineer, at the Aware Home. Perry previously worked for the Aware Home for five semesters as a student assistant. His summer research internship accomplishments were numerous

  He developed the third hardware revision of the Gait Speed Clinic Device from TechSage D3.3. The overall goal of this new printed circuit board was to reduce production time, reduce required experience, and reduce the cost of the system to allow for more clinics to access the device. 

  He also revised and setup the Aware Home's network infrastructure to allow the two main floors of the home to be isolated yet managed as one. This was implemented by using new network hardware that allowed for VLANs and more detailed firewall rules. All devices on the old network, as well as new devices, were moved to this new network. Smart home devices on this network are controlled and collect data through “Home Assistant” granting future researchers in the home greater access to device history.

  Additionally, he developed the Smart Bathroom's (TechSage D1.1) grab bar system to allow automated and manual movement via actuators. He implemented a button box for physical therapists to move the grab bars to the desired position. In the future, these positions can be saved for a voice command system to utilize.

Hoffman, an assistant professor in computer vision and IPaT faculty member, received a test of time award Thursday at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Vienna, Austria, for a paper she co-authored in 2014.

Hays, an associate professor in computer vision and robotics and IPaT faculty member, will receive a test of time award next week at the 2024 SIGGRAPH conference in Denver for a paper he co-authored in 2012. SIGGRAPH is the official conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

ICML, SIGGRAPH, and other computer science conferences recognize researchers whose work is at least 10 years old and has had a lasting impact since publication.

Read the full story from the College of Computing >>

Artec Leo is a wireless, handheld professional 3D scanner designed to make scanning easy and effortless. It allows students, engineers, product designers, CAD technicians, VFX artists, archeologists, game designers, and virtual reality app developers to create precise and workable 3D models out of a diverse range of physical objects and surfaces. The Artec Leo scanner captures an object as the user simply moves around the object as if filming a video. A 3D replica is built in real time on a display as the capture is occurring. 

“The Artec Leo is a great addition to our capabilities. It is one of those tools that ups your game on what kind of work you can do,” said Noah Posner, a research scientist in IPaT and manager of the Interactive Product Design Lab in the College of Design. “It is just so easy compared to other 3D scanners I have used in the past. It is fast, portable, and does a great job at capturing geometry. It is also fast and versatile enough to capture a scan of a person in instances where we are designing wearable devices.”

Additional equipment and upgrades are also being installed in the Craft Lab and its companion space, the Prototyping Lab:

• Bambu Lab X1E printer – This 3D printer excels in handling high-temperature materials for versatile and precise 3D printing. Its AI algorithm enhances print quality by rectifying initial layer flaws, ensuring consistent results. This printer supports various high-performance materials, making it ideal for both intricate prototypes and everyday items.
• Epilog Fusion Galvo Laser – This laser machine combines fast engraving and produces a variety of marks on metal including deep engraving, polished white marks, and deep black annealed etching. It makes an excellent companion and expansion to the existing capabilities of the Prototyping Lab’s 48” x 36” CO2 laser cutter from Epilog while sharing the same software workflow.
• Kniterate – This compact digital knitting machine turns digital designs into knitted garments automatically. It is a first-of-its-kind, fully automated knitting machine meant for desktop/small-scale use and makes these operations more accessible than traditional industrial machines.

Equipment Upgrade:

• Added a digital motor and encoder to the industrial leather stitcher – While the industrial equipment normally comes with a clutched motor that is difficult for new users to control, the lab has replaced it with a digital servo motor that can be run much slower without compromising the power benefits of industrial equipment. They also added a digital encoder, which ensures the needle always ends down in the material being stitched, allowing for precise control, and can be raised with the foot pedal instead of manually moving the handwheel. Those upgrades make the machine more user-friendly and easier to use.

“We are committed to the continuous improvement of IPaT’s Craft and Prototyping Labs, as spaces leveraged by the entirety of campus,” said Tim Trent, director of these spaces and IPaT faculty member. “From the Prototyping Lab’s inception in 2006 through the Craft Lab’s opening in 2022 and on to today, we are always looking to find ways to collaborate with and meet the needs of our users, whether they are individual researchers, student groups, or whole departments at Tech.”

The IPaT Craft Lab is located in the Technology Square Research Building, Room 225B. The IPaT Prototyping Lab is located on the basement level in Room S21. Equipment in the lab may be used for academic and research purposes across the entire Georgia Tech community. Contact the Craft Lab staff at craftlab@cc.gatech.edu or the Prototyping Lab staff at protolab@cc.gatech.edu.

The seven selected Georgia Tech students for IPaT’s 2024 summer research internship program, and projects, and their research mentors are:

• Sameer Arora, a computer science sophomore, who will work with Peter Presti, senior research scientist, on the prolonged exposure therapy iOS mobile app.
• Siddharth Jain, undergraduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
• Seongjin Kim, an electrical engineering sophomore, who will work with Celeste Mason, research scientist, on a passive haptic learning and rehabilitation project.
• Nathan Lin, a computational media senior, who will work with Peter Presti and Brian Jones, principal research scientist, on the Aware Home smart bathroom project.
• Grace Littler, an architecture undergraduate, who will work with Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab. The SimTigrate Design Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab using evidence-based design to improve the medical experience for patients and providers.
• Matthew Perry, a computer engineering junior, will work with the Aware Home researching gait speed and the smart bathroom.
• Shreya Sasmal, a computational media junior, who will be working with Kala Jordan, research scientist, and Maribeth Coleman, director of research for IPaT, on an augmented reality/artificial intelligence project. 

These Georgia Tech faculty members will lead one of the following research areas for IPaT: global health equity and wellbeing; just, resilient, and informed communities; responsible and ethical technologies; and arts, expression, and creative technologies. They hold positions in colleges and centers across campus, and will be instrumental in promoting transdisciplinary collaborative research and engagements.

BACKGROUND: In the fall of 2023, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) went through a strategic planning exercise and redefined its research concentrations to better align with its values. These new concentrations are also aspirational, encouraging IPaT researchers and academics to engage in new research domains that IPaT is uniquely equipped for generating new innovation. IPaT is one of Georgia Tech’s ten interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs) that bring together researchers from different disciplines to address topics of strategic importance to Georgia Tech. 
 
IPaT RESEARCH INITIATIVE LEAD DETAILS:
 
1. “Global Health Equity and Wellbeing” research will be led by Rudy Gleason.
Research concentration: From pediatrics to aging, we are protecting health both locally and worldwide. IPaT's continuum of healthcare research is working to promote and enable vibrant and lifelong physical and mental health. Accomplished scholars and clinicians work together to transform healthcare delivery systems by creating novel and easily accessible health and wellness technologies. IPaT has led breakthroughs in health information technology, approaches for increasing patient engagement and treatment adherence, clinical process improvements, and new healthcare delivery knowledge.
Bio: Rudolph (Rudy) L. Gleason is a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering. Gleason’s research program has two key and distinct research aims. The first research aim is to quantify the link between biomechanics, mechanobiology, and tissue growth and remodeling in diseases of the vasculature and other soft tissues. The second research aim is to translate engineering innovation to combat global health disparities and foster sustainable development in low-resource settings around the world.

2. “Just, Resilient, and Informed Communities” research will be led by Danielle Willkens.
Research concentration: Discovering strategies that benefit and inform communities from all walks of life. IPaT’s work in this area focuses on the daily lives of communities – how they live, work, and play. We are finding innovative approaches to shaping sustainable cities with research that thinks globally while acting locally. We're examining the transformative role of technology in transportation, civic engagement, and disaster recovery focusing on novel communication and information technologies to aid communities.
Bio: Danielle Willkens is an associate professor in the School of Architecture in the College of Design. Willkens, Assoc. AIA, FRSA, LEED AP BD+C, is a practicing designer, researcher, and FAA Certified Remote Pilot who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, exploring the project “From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South.” She currently has several research, documentation, and visualization projects in Selma, AL and Atlanta, GA supported by National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grants. She is also leading efforts on heritage documentation and sustainable tourism, alongside a number of collaborators, at the Penn Center, SC, Valencia, Spain, and Petra, Jordan.

3. “Responsible and Ethical Technologies” research will be led by Allen Hyde.
Research concentration: Evaluating potential consequences to mitigate negative effects. IPaT is shaping the human-technology frontier by growing human capabilities at every level. We're exploring new ideas in user experiences that foster creativity, stimulate learning and enable productive collaboration. Through this initiative, we're researching a variety of wearable computing, assistive, augmented reality, and gaming technologies. In addition, to insuring the alignment of these and other future technologies with responsible and ethical practices.
Bio: Allen T. Hyde is an associate professor in the School of History and Sociology in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Hyde is a quantitative scholar whose main research areas are stratification and inequality, urban sociology, work and occupations, climate and disaster resilience, and immigration. He is currently conducting research on the effects of race/ethnicity and immigration status on homeownership, social and demographic change in Clarkston, GA (known as the most diverse square mile in America), and Principal Investigator for the Youth Advocacy for Resilience to Disasters Program research project funded by the National Science Foundation's Civic Innovation Challenge. He has also been Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) grant. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut and has published research articles in journals like Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Social Currents, Environmental Sociology, Social Indicators Research, City & Community, and Sociological Perspectives.

4. “Arts, Expression, and Creative Technologies” research will be led by Lisa Marks.
Research concentration: Using advanced technology to enhance creative processes, artistic expression, and innovation. Through our research, IPaT is merging physical and digital worlds with innovative creative ideas. The creative uses of technology are endless. We seek to identify, nurture, and grow creative and artistic ideas which may unlock new processes, inspire practical solutions with outside the box thinking, or simply lead to new forms of art expression.
Bio: Lisa Marks is an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design in the College of Design. Marks is a designer and educator teaching studio courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Georgia Tech. Her current research focuses on methods of combining endangered and traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling in order to produce new modes of production. She has a Master of Industrial Design from Parsons School of Design and worked in New York for clients including Google, Nike, and Swarovski.

Peeler is a key team member supporting Georgia Tech’s Rural Computer Science Initiative launched in 2022. This initiative offers co-teaching lessons prepared by Georgia Tech faculty and offers virtual classes in computer science to expose Georgia high school students to a variety of technical topics and career pathways.

The program was conceived by Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, specifically STEM@GTRI, to create and launch a pilot program for rural Georgia school districts with support from Georgia’s legislators to bring technical knowledge directly into high school classrooms.

“I’ve created and taught Java professional development courses for high school teachers to learn and use in their classes,” said Peeler. “Part of my job is to be on call for instructors who need me to troubleshoot problems. In addition, we typically have a week of in-class instruction where I virtually beam into the class to teach directly, then we introduce a project for them to try and tackle on their own based from the in-class material that we taught. I really like what I’m doing for Georgia high schools.”

Peeler has also created an instructional module introducing students to robotic programming. Students develop and deploy code using the MakeCode environment which is an online platform and toolset developed by Microsoft that enables users, especially beginners and students, to learn programming and computer science concepts through blocked-based coding.

Through this initiative and with the help of Peeler, Georgia Tech is empowering the next generation of tech-savvy leaders fostering interest in STEM fields and opening doors to exciting career opportunities.

“I'm extremely proud to be a part of this initiative and kickstarting the next generation of high school students in the computer science realm,” said Peeler.

“We are pleased to be able to offer this fellowship program to the people of Liberia,” said Steven McLaughlin, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “The value of a Georgia Tech degree is well-documented and programs such as this one help us deliver on our commitment to empower people of all backgrounds and stages of life to learn and contribute to technological and human progress.”

Michael Best, executive director of IPaT, made the announcement during a luncheon hosted at Georgia Tech on May 11. Joseph N. Boakai, the 26th president of the Republic of Liberia, attended along with a Liberian delegation and representatives from the University Consortium for Liberia (UCL). The UCL provides scholarships, facilitates student exchange programs, study abroad opportunities, and service-learning initiatives between Liberia and partner organizations worldwide. This was President Boakai’s first official visit to the U.S. since becoming president in January.

“Education is the key to building a successful nation, and Georgia Tech is making great research and academic contributions to the Republic of Liberia and to the world,” said President Boakai. “The OMSCS fellowship program will provide the people of Liberia with an additional opportunity to benefit from this relationship and help advance our country.”

The OMSCS program, where coursework is done asynchronously, is one of Tech’s most successful global degree programs and is designed for students seeking a top-ranked degree with the flexibility to fit their studies around work and family commitments.

The purpose of the president’s visit was to thank assembled UCL members for their partnership in Liberia’s post-conflict development. In addition to Georgia Tech leadership, UCL members from Clark Atlanta University, Kennesaw State University, Fort Valley State University, Savannah State University, and the University of Georgia were also in attendance, along with Cynthia Blandford, UCL president.

Best, who also serves as a professor with Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and School of Interactive Computing, has a longstanding relationship with Liberia. His involvement began in 2005, just two years after the end of their civil war. His research focuses on information and communication technologies for social, economic, and political advancement. In Liberia, he has partnered in the development of their national information and communications technology and telecommunications policy, created and deployed technology-focused workforce development programs, outfitted computer facilities for public sector units, helped found the iLab Liberia technology and innovation hub, and developed novel digital systems to support that country’s post-conflict healing and reconciliation.

“President Boakai’s visit to Georgia Tech, just four months into his administration, underscores our deep ties and lasting partnership,” said Best. “These new OMSCS fellowships were received with remarkable enthusiasm, demonstrating that the relationship between the Republic of Liberia and Georgia Tech continues to flourish.”

The Georgia Tech Rural Computer Science Initiative offers co-teaching lessons prepared by Georgia Tech professors. The program offers virtual classes in computer science to help develop career pathways by exposing high school students to critical areas such as coding, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, sensors, and data visualization. The program is funded by the Georgia General Assembly.

The initiative, launched in 2022, includes 16 school districts, 19 high schools, and has taught 1,329 students. Continued growth of the program is expected in 2024 as the number of districts participating will grow to 24 school districts.

The program is run by Lizanne DeStefano, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC), and Leigh McCook, director with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). There are now thirteen Georgia Tech employees supporting the program across CEISMC, GTRI, and IPaT.

The meeting was designed to gather feedback and envision future directions to make the program even more successful.

Using ultrasound imaging technology coupled with a custom-built guidance tool, they invented a guidance system to help physicians navigate needles into the spine accurately and safely. In 2020, they were awarded a Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program, followed by a Phase II grant in 2021.

Ethos Medical’s co-founders Cassidy Wang, CEO, and Lucas Muller, CTO, personally oversaw the study held in the Technology Square Research Building lab space, working with physicians from local hospitals to better understand the human factors of their novel device.

The study was designed and moderated by Maureen Carroll and Stephen Jones of Creature, an award-winning industrial design firm based in Atlanta.

“Creature and our engineering partner, Enginuity Works, are working to improve the design, human factors, and usability of the system. By using the L[ux] Lab and bringing in emergency room doctors, we can observe physicians using the system and evaluate how well our system integrates with their work process,” said Carroll, founder of Creature.

Several Georgia Tech students from the SimTigrate Design Lab were also present, gaining hands-on experience with the planning and execution of such a study.

Part of the study’s goals are to assess how emergency room clinicians may adapt their existing workflow for performing lumbar punctures to one that incorporates this new needle guidance system while considering realistic procedural and safety constraints. A second goal is to evaluate the ability of clinicians to accomplish specific tasks that require interaction with the user interfaces of the system and identify interfaces and interactions that they perceive to be unintuitive or difficult to perform.

The L[ux] Lab, part of the SimTigrate Design Lab space, is an interdisciplinary research lab using evidence-based design to improve the medical experience for patients and providers. SimTigrate – combining concepts of simulation and integration – grew out of the Healthy Environments Research Group which involved Georgia Tech and Emory University with the goal of improving healthcare outcomes. The lab is affiliated with the Georgia Tech College of Design and is led by Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab and principal research associate in the College of Design.

“We’re fortunate that the L[ux] Lab’s simulated clinical environment is so conducive to medical device usability testing, and we’re grateful for all the support shown by Jennifer and the rest of the folks at SimTigrate,” said Wang, CEO of Ethos Medical. “We’ve already begun making improvements to address the friction points discovered during the clinicians’ hands-on interactions. We’re also seeing that many of these practitioners are excited about the capabilities our device brings to the point of care, both for lumbar punctures and beyond!”

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It’s a complex issue that is, unfortunately, awash in misunderstanding and misinformation. What’s more, according to Richard DeMillo, professor and founder of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) at Georgia Tech, there is a tendency in technology fields to hyperfocus on technical problems at the expense of complex social realities. “There are famous mathematicians who trained their students to not worry about the real world,” DeMillo says. “But the real world has a way of intruding.”

As a new dean at Georgia Tech in the early 2000s, DeMillo saw voting technology burst into national headlines after the highly contested presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Congress authorized billions of dollars for states to purchase voting machines, with little to no oversight, and Georgia’s secretary of state was one of the biggest spenders of these federal funds in an attempt to create what DeMillo remembers as “an unambiguously unbiased way of voting.” DeMillo and his cybersecurity colleagues at Georgia Tech put this idea to the test. “It didn’t take much to hack a voting machine in 2002,” he says.

DeMillo has since developed the Safe and Secure Elections research group, an interdisciplinary team from computer science, systems engineering, cognitive science, and international affairs that works on election security in the U.S. and abroad.

Read more about Georgia Tech's support of this public interest technology (PIT) >>

To stay informed by global experts as it plans potential policies on the subject, the WHO has created the Technical Advisory Group on Social Connection (TAG-SC). The 20-member committee will serve as an advisory body to guide the WHO on how it can increase political visibility, measure the extent of the problem, and identify effective interventions.

Munmun De Choudhury, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, is one of three U.S. experts on the internationally diverse committee.

De Choudhury is renowned for her research on the role of social media and how it shapes and influences mental health. She will serve a two-year term on the advisory group, providing insight to the TAG-SC on how social media and other technologies can affect loneliness and social connection.

“TAGs are the highest level of technical advisors at WHO and are noted to wield significant power as an independent body in shaping evidence-based policies and reforms on issues threatening global health,” De Choudhury said. 

“My involvement will center around how social media use relates to mental health and well-being outcomes, spanning varied populations, platforms, and cultural contexts, including the Global North and the Global South.” 

The advisory group’s findings will be part of a report that the WHO shares with its member states and partners. The report could guide relevant discussions within the United Nations General Assembly.

“We’re thinking about this question on a global stage, and an organization like WHO can help make this a global focus,” she said. “It’s an issue that is of significance everywhere in the world.”

The WHO estimates that loneliness and social isolation can increase the risk of mortality by 14-32%, which is on par with other well-known risk factors such as smoking and excessive drinking. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem.

“The harmful effects of loneliness are not just harmful mentally, but there are physical health aspects,” De Choudhury said. “Studies have shown that people who felt lonely have shorter life spans than those who felt supported. 

“There is an increased risk of things like cardiovascular disease or stroke, and suicide rates are also higher. To ensure our society wants to feel good and healthy, we must tackle this as a problem.”

The TAG-SC will advise the Secretariat of the WHO Commission on Social Connection, which comprises two co-chairs and nine commissioners tasked with making the harms of social isolation and loneliness a global health priority.

De Choudhury said the first step for TAG-SC is to measure the global impact of loneliness. They will do this by developing culturally aware measurement tools to assess the problem in different parts of the world. The process will inform any research, data collection initiatives, or interventions WHO may recommend.

“To take on this challenge, we must figure out the extent of the problem,” she said. “Before we can collect any data or identify potential mitigation strategies, we need to know what we should be measuring, and that’s where this committee plays a role.”

This recognition is the second major committee appointment De Choudhury has received in the last two years. She recently advised the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) on a 250-page report in December detailing social media’s impact on the health of adolescents and children.
 

Photo by Terence Rushin/College of Computing.