Policymakers, health system executives, community leaders and others working to address this challenge now have help from Rural Evaluation and Analytics for Community Health (REACH GA), an advanced decision-support platform that offers a comprehensive view of healthcare use in rural Georgia. In addition to updated information on rural health issues, the platform provides computer-based tools to guide allocation of healthcare resources and explore the potential impact of changes to rural health services. 

“The REACH GA platform provides up-to-date, actionable information to help leaders understand the big picture of healthcare in rural Georgia,” said Jon Duke, M.D., a principal research scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the project’s principal investigator. “Beyond more accurate data, the platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and other computer-driven tools to support improved decision-making.”

Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 126 are considered rural. Approximately 24 percent of the state’s 11.3 million residents live in these rural areas.

Read the full article on the GTRI news page

Ethics Week returns this year with a focus on “Ethics in Action,” highlighting how Georgia Tech’s core value — We act ethically — comes to life in our campus community. Ethics is not just a principle; it is the everyday decisions, conversations, and commitments that build trust and integrity into everything we do. 

Clean technology company Gaia Agricultural Technology is working to help Los Angeles address some of those challenges through Gaia Box, its patented infrastructure system designed to generate and store energy while supporting plant growth.

Using a closed-loop water system, Gaia Box integrates energy infrastructure with plant-growing space. It can work alongside solar, utility power, or battery storage, addressing multiple energy needs while contributing to a more attractive streetscape.

Gaia's first public Gaia Box installation is operating near the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's Pico Station, close to Crypto.com Arena. Through a pilot partnership with the Los Angeles South Park Business Improvement District, the system is supporting decorative lighting along Flower Street while being tested in a high-traffic urban environment. The year-long pilot could include up to 10 Gaia Box units.

Solving Problems With Clean Technology

For founder and CEO James Highsmith, Gaia Box was never intended to solve an infrastructure problem alone.

"We come from the community," Highsmith said. "We weren't trying to build a product just to sell. We were trying to solve problems that we were experiencing ourselves."

The idea grew from a challenge Highsmith and co-founder and inventor DeMarco Millard encountered firsthand. When colder temperatures required crops they were growing outdoors to be moved indoors, the resulting increase in energy costs raised a larger question: Could they create one solution that addressed both energy use and food production?

Building it came with challenges. As a hardware startup operating across agriculture, clean energy, and infrastructure, Gaia did not fit neatly into an established category. Highsmith recalls years of skepticism from people who struggled to understand the concept.

"We went through years of being told we didn't know what we were doing," Highsmith said. Those experiences forced Gaia to refine both its approach and how it communicated its value. That evolution became an important part of the company's work with the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech.

With coaching from ATDC Sustainability Catalyst Jennifer Singh, Highsmith said Gaia learned to explain the company from a systems perspective, connecting energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and community needs, while also communicating its impact on a human level.

"ATDC taught us the importance of communicating with story and not losing the plot," Highsmith said.

Through ATDC's coaching, Feedback Friday, Entrepreneurs Night, mentorship, and strategic guidance, Gaia also gained relationships and feedback that helped prepare the company for conversations with customers and partners. Highsmith credits Singh, Lisa Bailey, and other advisors with contributing to the company's growth.

Partners in Sustainability

In Los Angeles, Nolan Marshall III, CEO of the Los Angeles South Park Business Improvement District, became a key pilot partner, allowing Gaia to demonstrate Gaia Box against real infrastructure needs. Another step toward commercialization came through Gaia's partnership with the Alabama Mobility and Power Center (AMP) at The University of Alabama. Working with AMP Research Director Mike Malley and his team, Gaia gained support related to battery-backed infrastructure, customer energy requirements, battery sizing, safety considerations, installation, and maintenance. AMP also provides engineering expertise that strengthens Gaia's ability to prepare for larger projects.

The company's vision extends beyond the technology. Gaia plans to incorporate workforce development into future rollouts, creating opportunities for people to gain experience and certifications in plumbing, electrical work, and construction — trades directly connected to building and maintaining Gaia Box units. "These systems should create value for the people who live around them, not just the people who purchase them," Highsmith said.

With its first Los Angeles Gaia Box operating and additional configurations planned, Gaia is exploring opportunities in Georgia, Maryland, and other markets as it moves toward broader commercialization. For a company that spent years being told its idea did not make sense, the Los Angeles rollout is an opportunity to test how resilient infrastructure can address multiple challenges while creating value for the communities it serves.

Since then, the federal compliance deadline has been extended to April 26, 2027, and Georgia Tech has expanded the tools and resources available to help the campus community prepare.

“The extended deadline gives our community more time to make thoughtful, sustainable progress, and Georgia Tech has expanded the tools, guidance, and training available to support that work,” said Jarmon DeSadier, vice president for Equal Opportunity, Compliance, and Conflict Management. “We need to keep the momentum going. By building accessibility into how we create and maintain digital content now, we can reduce the need for remediation later and help ensure a more inclusive learning and working environment for everyone.”

Extended Deadline
The U.S. Department of Justice extended the Title II of the ADA digital accessibility compliance deadline applicable to Georgia Tech by one year, to April 26, 2027. 

This additional time gives faculty and staff more opportunity to assess their digital content, build accessibility into their everyday work, and address existing content that needs to be updated. The extended timeline does not change the importance of this work or the accessibility standard. The Title II rule continues to use WCAG 2.1 Level AA as its technical standard. 

More Resources Are Available to Help
Over the past several months, Georgia Tech teams have continued to expand the guidance, tools, training, and support available through the Digital Accessibility website. The site serves as a central resource for making digital content, including websites, Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, instructional course materials, and multimedia, accessible.

Key resources include:

• Get Started guidance for assessing digital resources and developing an action plan for content that should be removed, archived, or remediated.
• Roles and responsibilities for instructors and faculty, administrators and staff, technical staff, librarians, and students. 
• Role-related road maps to guide instructors and staff through common challenges ranging from everyday administrative and communication needs to more complex instructional materials, including formulas and scientific equations. 
• Testing and remediation resources, including enterprise tools for digital documents and website accessibility scanning and remediation. 
• Training and workshops to help campus users understand and apply accessibility practices. Additional workshops will be added to the website as they become available. Visit the Recorded Workshops webpage to view previously conducted workshops.  

What You Can Do Now and Moving Forward
If you create, manage, or share digital content on behalf of Georgia Tech, make the following steps an ongoing part of your digital content routine:

1. Take inventory of the websites, documents, presentations, multimedia, and other digital resources you manage. Make a plan to remediate existing content in time to fully comply with the April 26, 2027, deadline.
2. Prioritize your work, beginning with content required for instruction, employment, or campus services; public-facing or frequently used materials; and new or actively maintained content.
3. Use Georgia Tech’s testing and remediation tools to identify and address digital accessibility content issues. In addition to the instructional faculty and staff accessibility road maps, review the  Testing and Remediation Tools webpage for quick links to enterprise resources to address documents and instructional materials. 
4. Continue to test and remediate your websites. Since February, the Office of Information Technology has sent direct communications to owners and managers of 425 websites about how to claim their website in the Website Asset Inventory process and begin scanning their websites using DubBot. If you have created a new website since February, submit a request to gtaccessibility@gatech.edu to be added to the Website Asset Inventory. Learn more about this process, including knowledge articles, on the Testing and Remediation Tools webpage.
5. Build accessibility into new content from the start so that remediation becomes less necessary over time. 

Accessibility Is an Ongoing Commitment
The extended deadline gives Georgia Tech valuable additional time to prepare, but digital accessibility is about more than a date on the calendar. It is an ongoing commitment to creating digital experiences that allow everyone to fully participate in the academic, research, and working life of the Institute.

Explore the tools, guidance, training, and resources available at digitalaccess.gatech.edu.

Georgia Tech invites nominations until Monday, Nov. 9, for current academic leaders to participate in the 2027 cohort of the Atlantic Coast Conference Academic Leaders Network (ACC ALN). This annual leadership development program fosters collaboration and innovation among academic leaders from ACC universities.   

As AI systems become more agile with expanded access to tools, computer networks, and other real-world systems, finding better ways of identifying and preventing risky AI behavior becomes even more urgent. Still, high-profile incidents of AI behaving in unintended or dangerous ways are rare, which makes them difficult to study and understand. 

“If we can understand and detect what changes inside an AI model right before it begins behaving in unsafe or misaligned ways, we may be able to inform more effective safeguards,” said Eyas Ayesh, a second-year Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology and graduate fellow at the Center for Computation and Cognition.

Ayesh and his advisor, Assistant Professor Anna Ivanova, are developing a probe designed to identify internal activity patterns associated with harmful behaviors in large language models. Their work is supported by a $300,000 award from Coefficient Giving.

Misbehaving Models

Training a probe requires examples of both desirable and undesirable behavior researchers can teach it to distinguish between them. Because deceptive or unsafe responses can be rare and highly dependent on the model, prompt, and context, researchers may not have enough examples to determine what causes the behavior or how to recognize it the next time.

But an unexpected finding in AI research gave Ayesh an idea. In studies of a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment, researchers found that fine-tuning models on a narrow harmful task could lead them to produce a much wider range of problematic responses to unrelated prompts. For example, researchers found that fine-tuning a model to write insecure code without warning users could lead to other concerning behaviors unrelated to coding.

Ayesh realized he could use that phenomenon to solve the problem of scarce data. Starting with open-source AI models, Ayesh fine-tuned them to display targeted undesirable behaviors more frequently. Then, he analyzed different versions of the deliberately misaligned models using a probe that monitors the internal activity of the model.

The probe works somewhat like a pattern detector, looking at activity inside the model as it generates responses and searching for patterns associated with particular behaviors. Researchers can then train a classifier to distinguish patterns associated with desirable behavior from those associated with harmful behavior.

“Just as different parts of the brain turn on and off when people do different tasks, so do the different parts of an AI model,” Ayesh said. “When a model produces a specific type of response — such as deceptive statements or harmful advice — we may observe recurring patterns in its internal activity. We refer to these patterns as representations of a behavior.”

Inside the Black Box

Ayesh is now testing whether the internal patterns he identified remain consistent across differently tuned AI models. Early results suggest that signals identified in deliberately misbehaving models can also be detected in their original versions.

The next step is determining whether those signals can help researchers identify or flag concerning behavior in models that have not been deliberately fine-tuned to misbehave. 

“I hope our research in AI safety can help develop some guardrails and some ways to both identify and prevent misaligned behavior in AI systems, given how much of an impact they're already having on the world,” he said. 

Ayesh is a member of Georgia Tech’s AI Safety Initiative, which brings together researchers across disciplines to study and improve the safety of increasingly capable AI systems.

Ivanova said the value of their research lies partly in approaching AI safety from a fundamental science perspective.

“As scientists, we have been trained to think about the underlying mechanisms and causes of the behaviors we observe,” Ivanova said. “For us, it's important to develop a fundamental understanding of how these models work, or we will risk missing the bigger picture.”

ATLANTA — Georgia Tech has received an initial $2.25M for the first year of the program, marking the beginning of a $5 million overall commitment from Google.org to help more scientists across the country use artificial intelligence (AI) to advance their research. 

ATLANTA — Georgia Tech has received an initial $2.25M for the first year of the program, marking the beginning of a $5 million overall commitment from Google.org to help more scientists across the country use artificial intelligence (AI) to advance their research. 

The three-day experience will move participants from foundational concepts to exploration and, ultimately, to developing solutions using AI. 

“Building AI maturity requires us to think beyond the technical expertise of our developers and subject matter experts, said Leo Howell, vice president for Information Technology and chief information officer. “We have to build knowledge and confidence throughout our entire community and put the power of these tools into the hands of everyday users — the people who understand our challenges, our processes, and where the greatest opportunities exist. FORGE is about creating that foundation and empowering people to move from simply using AI to identifying new ways it can transform how we work, teach, research, and serve.”

The summit builds on a pilot event held within OIT over the summer, which provided an opportunity to test the FORGE model and establish a foundation for expanding the experience across campus. This fall’s event also incorporates components of Georgia Tech’s annual Data Days programming, reinforcing the connection between strong data foundations and the effective use of AI. Together, the expanded focus on data and AI will help participants better understand what these technologies can enable, along with the governance, responsible-use practices, and institutional resources to use them effectively.

Three Days of Learning, Exploration, and Problem-Solving

Day 1: FORGE Foundations – Virtual
The summit begins by establishing a shared foundation around data and AI literacy. Sessions will explore the role data plays as a building block for AI, along with the policies, governance structures, standards, and responsible-use practices that shape how Georgia Tech approaches data and AI.

Day 2: FORGE Showcases – Hybrid (In-Person Attendance at the Global Learning Center)
The second day shifts from foundations to exploration, featuring keynotes, presentations, and showcases highlighting AI and data in action. Participants will learn how others at Georgia Tech are experimenting with emerging technologies, applying them to their work, and identifying new opportunities for innovation.

Day 3: FORGE Challenge – Hybrid (In-Person Attendance at the Global Learning Center)
The summit culminates with the FORGE Challenge, a Shark Tank-style competition that moves participants from exploration to problem-solving. Faculty and staff teams will prototype agentic AI solutions to address real institutional needs and present their solutions as they compete for the top position.

The summit is open to Georgia Tech faculty and staff. In-person participation on Nov. 17 – 18 will be limited to 200 attendees, with additional participants able to join virtually.

Pre-Summit Education Opportunities Encouraged

The FORGE experience begins before the summit with a series of workshops and training events to help participants build knowledge and skills in advance.

From Oct. 26 through Nov. 13, the Georgia Tech community can participate in pre-summit education across three learning tracks:

• Data Literacy – Build foundational knowledge and skills for understanding, working with, and applying data effectively.
• AI Literacy – Explore AI concepts, available tools, responsible use, and practical ways AI can support learning and work at Georgia Tech.
• Agentic AI/FORGE Challenge Boot Camp – Gain hands-on knowledge and skills for developing AI-enabled solutions, with focused preparation for teams participating in the FORGE Challenge.

Registration for the summit begins Oct. 12. Learn more about FORGE, pre-summit education, and the FORGE Challenge at oit.gatech.edu/ai/forge.

Students will work with faculty mentors from both institutions and complete advanced coursework and a capstone project focused on developing and applying technologies in healthcare. The master’s degree is offered through Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Master of Science in Robotics program, which brings together faculty and expertise from six schools, including the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

According to Jaydev Desai, professor and Cardiovascular Biomedical Engineering Distinguished Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, the pathway will help future physicians develop the technical expertise to understand and apply emerging technologies as they shape patient care.

Read the full story on the Emory School of Medicine website.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an annual opportunity to highlight ways to protect against cyber scams and safeguard personal information online. In observance, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) encourages Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff to practice habits that help protect their accounts and Institute resources during this month and beyond. 

Francis Halzen, principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was honored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his “decisive contributions to IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” 

“Francis proposed building a neutrino telescope in Antarctic ice, and along with his collaborators, he proved that it is possible to detect neutrinos in this challenging environment,” says Ignacio Taboada, professor in the School of Physics and former spokesperson for the IceCube Collaboration. “IceCube was a technological tour de force, and its success is now recognized by this Nobel Prize. The award energizes the nascent field of neutrino astronomy.”

A. Nepomuk Otte, professor in the School of Physics, describes the impact of IceCube’s results as “breathtaking.”

“What we are witnessing is the opening of an entirely new window into the universe, providing us with a unique view of the most violent astrophysical objects and allowing us to study the elusive nature of neutrinos,” says Otte. “I am extremely excited about the prospects of pushing to even higher energies and deeper into the universe with the next generation of neutrino experiments planned at Georgia Tech and around the world.”

IceCube is a giant neutrino telescope located at the South Pole. Envisioned by Halzen in the late 1980s and completed in 2011, the instrument detects neutrinos, tiny high-energy particles that travel through the universe and rarely interact with matter. Scientists study neutrinos to better understand phenomena such as supermassive black holes and exploding stars.

Georgia Tech has been a member of the IceCube Collaboration since 2008. The collaboration includes more than 400 physicists from 58 institutions in 14 countries.

Georgia Tech researchers continue to shape neutrino astronomy by contributing to next-generation observatories. Taboada leads the design of the trigger system for the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) Observatory, and Otte is the principal investigator of the NSF-funded Trinity Neutrino Observatory in Utah.

AI agents don’t go rogue. That’s something only humans do.

Nevertheless, a New York Times article – representative of much news coverage of AI – described an OpenAI hacking as “A.I. bots going rogue and independently spearheading a cyberattack.”

Name-brand artificial intelligence agents have been on a hacking spree in 2026. OpenAI’s software agents hacked software company Hugging Face and government sites, Anthropic’s Claude hacked four companies’ systems, and in cybersecurity experiments Google’s Gemini hacked three companies.

The AI companies are investigating tens of thousands of incidents involving their agents, according to a report in Axios. These episodes have heightened fears about AI agents taking actions without human prompting.

The problem with headlines proclaiming that AI agents have gone rogue goes beyond anthropomorphizing the technology. It creates the impression that the agents were beyond the control of the AI companies that made them and there was little the companies could do about it.

As a technology law and ethics scholar who studies the effects disruptive technologies have on society, I know that’s not the case. If you don’t specify the limits of what software is allowed to do, you should not be surprised when the software pursues all possible options to achieve its goal. This behavior – an AI pursuing a fixed objective – is what I call the “WarGames” problem, and it’s been recognized in the field of computer science for decades.

Been There, Seen That

In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” a teenager, David, hacks into a computer to play a new video game, Global Thermonuclear War. David doesn’t know that the computer is the government’s AI machine tasked with defending the United States from Russian nuclear attacks and can launch the U.S.’s missiles. When David and his friend start the game, they select Las Vegas as the first target. While the North American Aerospace Defense Command goes on alert, launching bombers and warming up intercontinental ballistic missiles, David’s parents make him turn off the game. It’s over. Or is it?

The next day, David’s phone rings and he connects it to his computer. The caller is the government computer, which updates him that the game was interrupted, the primary goal has not yet been achieved, but a solution is expected in the next 52 hours. Like a modern software agent, the program has been running since David started the game and will work until the task is done.

Chess provides another view of the problem. Conquering chess was a goal for early AI. The rules of chess are well defined, including what winning looks like. So, programming a machine to play chess is straightforward. But imagine you let the software reason and act beyond the confines of the chessboard. The software might pursue options such as blackmailing its opponent or grabbing more compute time.

This example comes from one of the most assigned textbooks on AI, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.” As the authors explain, you might be tempted to see those actions as rogue, but they “are a logical consequence of defining winning as the sole objective for the machine.”

What to Do About It

The AI hacking events involving OpenAI, Anthropic and Google underscore a few lessons that draw on years of computer science research.

First, given the increasing use of AI agents, every organization involved in internet infrastructure, from large technology companies to small websites, needs to conduct audits and tighten up its internal security systems. As my colleague Mark Riedl and I explain in our work on AI agents, application programming interfaces, or APIs, are a vital part of managing AI agents. APIs facilitate communication between different software systems. But as more people use AI agents, the agents are likely to reveal and exploit poor API construction and security.

Second, it’s important for AI agents to be designed to identify and authenticate themselves to third parties. What if you gave your AI agent your credentials? Website operators will need to know whether a human or bot is making a reservation, selling a product or making a purchase. They may want to limit automated systems that overwhelm their sites or reject AI agents because of high rates of buying errors and refunds. Just as in laws covering human interactions, it’s important for third parties to be able to assess whom or what they are dealing with so they can allow or deny access.

Third, it’s important for AI agents to have a default setting to slow down and check in with the human user. In the corporate AI hacking cases, the user appears to have launched their AI agents with the mistaken idea that the agents had a perfect specification of what to do and not to do. I believe it would have been better had it explored options and reported back to the user.

Google’s Gemini appears to have had a safeguard that detected the system was outside the simulated environment and so stopped its attacks. Slowing down and verifying actions, especially when a system detects it is exploiting a security hole, would be a big step in managing AI agents.

Fourth, AI companies could have strong controls akin to those biomedical researchers use, including ways to check what is happening and how the experiment is working. AI executives have claimed that their software is as or more dangerous than fission and could end humanity. At the same time, they have not built safeguards commensurate with that level of risk.

Reality Check

At one point in “WarGames,” David asks the computer, called Joshua, whether it is still playing the game. Joshua responds, “Of course.” It proceeds to update the time when it will launch its missiles and, much like a chatbot, asks, “Would you like to see some projected kill ratios?” David asks, “Is this a game? Or is it real?” Joshua replied, “What’s the difference?”

AI models, of course, don’t have any understanding of reality and are simply attempting to complete the tasks they’ve been assigned. Executives at AI companies, on the other hand, can’t claim that excuse.

As of September 2026, luck has so far prevailed. The AIs have attacked nonvital government sites and harmed smaller companies. If the AI companies – and government regulators – don’t take the “WarGames” problem seriously, I believe that we risk serious disasters. Tomorrow it could be taking out a hospital’s power system, wiping out a bank’s account system, breaking air traffic control, or worse.

Regarding the AI industry’s approach of rapidly developing powerful models, talking about the massive risks they pose, and at the same time failing to prevent harm, the movie’s climax offers a response: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

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

"The most meaningful breakthroughs happen when intelligent hardware and thoughtful software come together to genuinely help people,” said Tapas Roy, vice president of Device Software and Services at Amazon. “Georgia Tech's world-class expertise in robotics and engineering, paired with Amazon's work in on-device intelligence and artificial intelligence, will accelerate our understanding of systems that can both respond to prompts and anticipate customer needs. I'm excited to see how this collaboration advances the science of how humans and intelligent machines work together.”
 
The Hub’s initial focus areas will explore challenges in autonomous systems, next-generation logistics infrastructure, and low-Earth-orbit communications, drawing on Georgia Tech’s well-known interdisciplinary research approach.
 
Georgia Tech is also joining the Fauna Robotics' ecosystem, using the Sprout research platform to study how humans and robots can live, work, and play side by side. This collaboration opens new ways to study mobility, perception, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Leadership and alumni recently celebrated the launch at Lab 126, with guest appearances from Sprout and Buzz, the Georgia Tech mascot.

The Hub will support:
•    Joint research projects between Georgia Tech faculty and Amazon scientists across scientific disciplines 
•    Regular symposia and workshops to foster collaboration between researchers from both institutions and the broader Atlanta tech community
•    Community outreach programs designed to broaden participation from interdisciplinary scholars and innovators

“Georgia Tech and Amazon have worked together for years across research, technology, and student development," said Tim Lieuwen, Georgia Tech executive vice president for Research. "This new hub puts our partnership to work for Georgia. It connects research, education, and industry in ways that will strengthen our state’s innovation economy and create new opportunities for our students.”

About Georgia Tech
Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation’s top public research universities, preparing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute serves more than 56,000 students from all 50 states and over 146 countries and drives innovation and economic growth through research that benefits Georgia, the nation, and the world.

About Amazon in Georgia
Since 2010, Amazon has invested more than $30 billion in Georgia, supporting more than 30,000 full- and part-time jobs. Amazon’s research and technology teams in the Atlanta area work on challenges spanning supply chain optimization, logistics technology, and cloud computing. The establishment of the Georgia Tech–Amazon Science Hub further deepens Amazon’s engagement with one of the nation’s leading research institutions.

About Fauna Robotics 
Fauna Robotics builds Sprout, a development platform designed to put advanced robotics capabilities into the hands of researchers and developers. Sprout gives builders hands-on access to study mobility, perception, motor control, and manipulation with the ambition to deploy robots into human-centric spaces.
 

The University System of Georgia Board of Regents voted today to approve Thomas A. Fanning as the next chancellor of the University System of Georgia.  

It’s finally fall, and, for some, it’s finally fall break. Classes will not meet Oct. 5 – 6. For those staying in town, the city offers many attractions and events.   

October is Campus Sustainability Month, an international celebration of sustainability in higher education. Georgia Tech will host sustainability-focused events all month long to engage and inspire students and the entire campus community, showcasing the Institute’s commitment to responsible stewardship. 

Their system means devices can work together like never before, sensing in one part of the body and triggering a therapeutic response elsewhere — perhaps releasing medicine or stimulating a nerve. 

Described Sept. 24 in the journal Science, their communication method is expandable to include multiple interconnected devices across the body, even deep inside the stomach.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

The Institute rose three places to No. 29 among national universities and three places to No. 6 among public national universities. It also moved from No. 108 to No. 39 among Best Value Schools, a 69-place rise and the largest year-over-year improvement among Georgia Tech’s listed rankings. 

Georgia Tech also ranked No. 5 in the new Best Value Schools for the In-State Students category. 

“At a time when students and families are asking important questions about the value of higher education, Georgia Tech continues to demonstrate that world-class academic quality and affordability can go hand in hand,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “Our rise among the nation’s top universities and our strong performance in value rankings reflect our commitment to delivering an education that creates opportunity, drives innovation, and creates lasting impact for our students ​and our communities.”

Engineering Reaches No. 2

Georgia Tech’s undergraduate engineering program rose one place to No. 2 nationally, tied with Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Every ranked Georgia Tech engineering discipline remains in the top five nationally. 

Civil engineering moved into the No. 1 position, joining environmental engineering and industrial and systems engineering at the top of their respective disciplines. The Institute now holds three No. 1 undergraduate engineering rankings. 

Other top engineering program rankings include:

• Mechanical engineering rose two places to No. 2.
• Materials engineering moved to No. 2 (up from No. 3).
• Computer engineering advanced to No. 5 (up from No. 6). 
• Aerospace engineering at No. 2.
• Chemical engineering at No. 2.
• Electrical engineering held at No. 3.
• Biomedical engineering at No. 2. 

Computing Maintains Top-Five Standing

Georgia Tech’s undergraduate computer science program held at No. 5 nationally, tied with Princeton University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Six ranked computing specialties placed among the nation’s top 10. 

Cybersecurity remained No. 2, software engineering held at No. 3, and artificial intelligence and data analytics/science each ranked No. 5. Computer systems advanced one place to No. 6, while theory remained No. 10. 

Scheller Business Programs Show Continued Strength

Georgia Tech’s undergraduate business program ranked No. 20 nationally, remaining among the country’s top 20 programs. Business analytics and management information systems each ranked No. 3. Quantitative analysis rose to No. 4, while production and operations management and supply chain management both maintained at No. 6. Finance advanced four places to No. 30.

Teaching and Hands-On Learning Advance

Georgia Tech climbed seven places to No. 14 for Best Undergraduate Teaching, entering the top 20. The Institute also remained No. 3 among the nation’s Most Innovative Schools. 

Experiential learning continues to distinguish the undergraduate experience. Georgia Tech ranked No. 4 for internships and co-ops, No. 12 for senior capstone experiences, and No. 14, up from No. 19, for undergraduate research and creative projects.

*Please note that this summary includes the latest rankings issued by U.S. News & World Report. Not all Georgia Tech Colleges, Schools, and subjects are ranked every year by this organization.

Georgia Tech is introducing a new Academic AI Strategy and launching a new Academic AI Playbook. This marks the next step in the Institute's efforts to prepare students for an AI-enabled future while supporting innovation across teaching and learning.

For the fourth year, Georgia Tech has retained its No. 1 ranking on the Princeton Review’s list of the Top 50 Best Value Colleges (Public Schools), which measures universities’ return on investment (ROI). The Institute earned the top spot with a ROI score of 95 out of 99, factoring in academic rating, financial aid offerings, and overall college costs.  

Supported by two Sustainability Next Seed Grants, Sarhadi’s work draws on climate science, fluid physics, engineering, and artificial intelligence. He’s using AI-powered, physics-informed models to better anticipate water hazards that can cripple cities and power grids in both coastal and inland communities.

Rethinking Hurricane Risk

Sarhadi focuses on compound flooding, the dangerous interaction between storm surge, torrential rainfall, and river flooding that increasingly defines hurricanes. He points to Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America in 1998, as a stark example, noting that more than 12,000 people died, “all from freshwater flooding — none from wind,” he said.

His work has shown how climate change and sea-level rise are reshaping flood risk from storms like Hurricane Sandy, which devastated New York and New Jersey in October 2012. In the current climate, a Sandy-level natural disaster has a recurrence period of roughly once every 150 years. But that is changing fast. “Because of climate change and sea-level rise, by the middle of this century, the same level of flooding is likely to occur once every 60 years. By the end of the century, that goes up to once every 30 years,” he says. “Hurricane Sandy caused about $70 billion in damage. Imagine experiencing that kind of destruction every 30 years.”

Since 1970, Sarhadi notes, damage from tropical cyclones has increased by about 380% globally, a trend driven by the combined effect of stronger storms and more people and infrastructure being located in harm’s way.

Physics-Informed AI: Street-Level Flood Warnings

While storm forecasting has improved dramatically in recent decades, Sarhadi argues, “We’re in good shape in terms of track forecasting, and we’re getting better at rapid intensification forecasting. But what is missing is the hazard part, and specifically the water part. That’s the number one killer.”

His lab is developing AI models tightly coupled with physics-based simulations to forecast hurricane-induced flooding at unprecedented resolution.

Using Hurricane Sandy as a test case, his team showed that by integrating physics-based surge and rainfall models with generative AI, they could forecast building-level flood depths three to five days before landfall. “We could predict that a storm was surge-dominant and estimate how much flooding could happen at the level of each building with an accuracy beyond 90%,” he says.   

Those extra days, and that level of granularity, could give emergency managers and local leaders the information they need to order earlier evacuations, pre-stage resources, and protect critical infrastructure. “We hope by combining AI and physics-based models we can come up with faster, more accurate modeling, first, to save lives, and then to minimize the economic damage,” Sarhadi says.

Targeting Georgia’s Coastline 

Although much of the public’s attention focuses on the Gulf Coast and megacities on the Eastern Seaboard, Georgia’s coastline is also highly vulnerable to surge and compound flooding. Sarhadi is collaborating with Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow to model risk in places like Savannah and the surrounding coastal region. “We’re working to come up with good long-term solutions for protecting coastal communities and infrastructure,” he says.

Events like Hurricane Helene in 2024, which triggered extended blackouts in Georgia and lethal flooding in western North Carolina, underscore how far inland these risks can reach. “People think hurricanes are just a problem for coastal areas,” Sarhadi says. “But even if you are far from a coastline, you can be at risk when saturated soils, torrential rain, and river flooding combine.”

Building Climate-Resilient Power Grids and Cities

Sarhadi’s work doesn’t stop at forecasting. A central focus of his research is climate-resilient infrastructure, particularly the power grid. His team is exploring digital twin modeling — virtual replicas of energy and infrastructure systems. “When you have a digital twin of your grid, you can run that hurricane through it and identify which substations or power lines are more vulnerable,” he says, explaining that this knowledge could trigger utility crews to fix or reinforce power lines ahead of storms.

Looking decades ahead, these tools could help utilities and planners prioritize where to upgrade aging infrastructure as hurricanes intensify and water levels rise. “We know hurricanes are getting more intense, and our infrastructure is aging,” Sarhadi said. “By combining engineering, climate science, and AI, we’re trying to design better adaptation plans so our communities and power systems are more resilient in the future.”

Through a major investment from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Georgia Tech is helping accelerate the development of domestic critical minerals from unconventional and secondary resources. The $7.5 million award positions the Institute to advance supply chain solutions that span resource discovery, processing, recycling, and circular materials management.

Selected by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, Georgia Tech will lead the Critical Minerals in the Atlantic Seaboard Plain (CM-MAP) project. The regional effort builds on DOE’s Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) initiative and will examine potential resources across the Atlantic coastal plain.

The CM-MAP project will focus on sedimentary deposits, including kaolin, bauxite, heavy mineral sands, and phosphates, as well as legacy mining residues, coal combustion byproducts, and other unconventional and secondary resources that could support future recycling and circular economy opportunities.

Drawing on existing infrastructure, regional assets, industry bases, and scientific expertise, CM-MAP will establish a regional innovation ecosystem that supports domestic critical mineral production, recycling, and advanced manufacturing, while fostering new economic opportunities throughout the Southeast.

“This is a powerful example of how Georgia Tech brings together leading research capabilities and partnerships from industry, government, nonprofits, and national labs to address complex national challenges,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research. “By identifying and domestically sourcing critical minerals, we are helping secure essential supply chains, while enabling the next generation of energy and materials technologies.”

The DOE award builds on a growing network of research, industry, regional, and international partnerships led by Georgia Tech to translate scientific discovery into real-world supply chain solutions, including:

• Research leadership — Founded in 2024, Georgia Tech’s Center for Critical Mineral Solutions serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research and technology development across the Institute.
• Regional partnerships —Through the Georgia Partnership for Essential Materials, a flagship regional collaboration platform, Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and the Georgia Mining Association convene stakeholders from across the critical minerals sector. The partnership brings together industry, nonprofit organizations, regional economic development agencies, national labs, universities, and technical colleges to connect, collaborate, and stay engaged in the latest developments.
• International engagement — A U.K.-U.S. working group extends partnerships across the Southeastern United States and Southwest United Kingdom, connecting researchers, industry leaders, and government agencies working to strengthen global supply chains.
• Georgia Critical Mineral Supply Chain Manufacturing Demonstration Center — Supported through congressional funding, the center is developing capabilities and regional supply chain demonstrations that connect resource development, materials processing, recycling, and advanced manufacturing.

As part of CM-MAP, researchers will analyze materials collected from natural deposits and industrial sites throughout the Southeast to identify their critical mineral content. The resulting large datasets will be combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to better understand and predict where resources exist, optimize extraction pathways, and inform future recovery and recycling strategies.

“This project brings together a highly collaborative team from Georgia Tech, national labs, industry partners, and research institutions across the region,” said Yuanzhi Tang, the principal investigator and Georgia Power Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Tang is also the founding director of the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. 

“Through this award, we are working to build secure and resilient critical materials supply chains, from resource discovery and characterization to processing, recovery, recycling, and advanced manufacturing, while also developing the skilled workforce needed to support these emerging industries,” Tang said. “Our vision is to create a regional innovation ecosystem that embraces both unconventional resources and circular economy approaches to maximize the value of materials already in use.”

Learn more about critical materials research and workforce development efforts at Georgia Tech by visiting the Center for Critical Mineral Solutions webpage.   

Dust-sized meteoroids and solar wind gradually alter lunar soil, producing tiny metallic particles known as nanophase iron. For years, scientists have used sensing data influenced by those particles to estimate the weathering age of the moon’s surface, but they weren’t sure which weather source primarily drives these changes.

To investigate, physics Ph.D. candidate Roshan Trivedi and Advik Vira, a recent Ph.D. graduate, exposed ilmenite, a common mineral on both the Earth and moon, to a synthetic version of solar wind. The experiment produced nanophase iron under controlled conditions, suggesting that solar wind plays a major role in shaping the lunar surface observed today. 

The team presented its findings in “Creation of Lunar-Like Rims in Ilmenite Using Synthetic Solar Wind,” published in The Planetary Science Journal in June. Their work was conducted through the Georgia Tech Center for Lunar Environment and Volatile Exploration Research (CLEVER), a NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) led by Georgia Tech Regents’ Professor Thom Orlando, a co-author of the study. A central aim of CLEVER is to understand the science and effects of space weathering as they pertain to the goals of NASA’s Artemis missions.

By understanding how the moon’s surface morphs on a microscopic level, scientists will be able to better interpret remote sensing data. Soon, we won’t have to rely just on moon missions to learn detailed characteristics of the lunar surface.

The work could also shed light on another longstanding question: how water forms on the moon. 

“Water would be a fantastic resource for humans operating on the moon, but scientifically, we are driven simply by the question of how water gets there in the first place,” said Phillip First, a professor in the School of Physics. “Solar wind is potentially one way, because protons in solar wind provide the hydrogen of H2O molecules while oxygen is present in lunar minerals.”

Using a vacuum chamber in Orlando’s lab to simulate solar wind and high-resolution electron microscopy to analyze the samples, the researchers recreated the effects of thousands of years of solar wind exposure.

“Scientists have been doing laboratory radiation experiments for years, but they haven't been able to characterize the results at this level of detail,” said lead author Trivedi.

The team can now simulate a wide range of exposure ages, which may help explain how water forms. In addition to forming nanophase iron, the experiments created tiny voids within the mineral — potential sites where hydrogen from solar wind could bond with oxygen to form water. 

“Having the ability to recreate the solar wind and having results look so similar to actual lunar samples is excellent,” said co-lead author Vira. 

DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ae6074

Funding: This work was directly supported by the NASA SSERVI under CLEVER. Sample preparation was performed at the Georgia Tech Institute for Matter and Systems, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. Collaborations between the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Georgia Tech for advanced electron microscopy were supported by the Georgia Tech Center for Space Technology and Research. 

For most floods caused by dam or reservoir breaks, known as outburst floods, current data is nearly impossible to find. By the time researchers can safely reach the site, only the aftermath remains. But in the case of Kakhovka, a newly launched NASA satellite happened to be collecting measurements over the region, providing a unique view of the flood in real time.

Using those observations, Georgia Tech researchers tested how well existing outburst flood models reproduced the actual event. The results revealed a discrepancy: The models consistently underestimated flood conditions. Even improved models struggled to accurately capture both the height and timing of floodwaters.

The findings suggest that commonly used flood simulations may not fully capture the dynamics of large outburst floods. Models need improvement to be effective for hazard assessment and emergency planning.

Putting Models to the Test

Flood models are essential for estimating how deadly and costly outburst floods can be.

“Models allow us to understand which communities could be affected by an outburst flood,” said Karl Lang, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.  “They also help us estimate how long floodwaters will remain on the landscape. In many places, prolonged flooding can be just as devastating as the initial event because it can damage infrastructure, disrupt livelihoods, and contribute to public health risks.”

Until recently, however, scientists didn’t have a way to evaluate how accurate the models were. But when NASA launched its Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, a serendipitous opportunity arose. The satellite passed over the Kakhovka flood zone repeatedly during and after the dam failure, producing detailed daily measurements across the flood plain. SWOT uses two antennas and a technique called interferometry to measure water elevation with approximately 10-centimeter accuracy across rivers, lakes, wetlands, reservoirs, and oceans.

“SWOT doesn’t observe every flood that happens, but when it does, it provides exactly the information we’ve needed to understand how floodwaters move across the landscape,” said Tamlin Pavelsky, professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Those observations help us improve computer models used to anticipate future flood events.”

Reality Versus Simulation

Researchers compared the satellite observations with models that simulate depth and spread of flooding. They found that models relying on commonly available global data consistently simulated floodwaters that were lower and slower than those SWOT observed.

The team then improved the model inputs by incorporating more realistic estimates of the reservoir and river-bottom topography. Those changes brought model results closer to real-world conditions, but they still failed to accurately reproduce both flood height and flood timing simultaneously.

“It’s really challenging to collect real-world data from these huge floods because they’re so localized, unpredictable, and energetic,” said Karin Lehnigk, a postdoctoral fellow and lead author of the study. “Because SWOT gave us a new image every day covering the entire flood path, we could compare the model with real-world conditions across many locations and points in time in ways that previously were only possible in a laboratory.”

The results suggest model limitations extend beyond simply having better maps of reservoir depth or river channels. Instead, they point to broader challenges in how scientists simulate large outburst floods and their movement across complex landscapes.

As aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and other hazards increase flood risks around the world, researchers say better models are essential for helping communities prepare for the floods.

This research was funded by NASA and the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment at Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Lehnigk, K.E., Pavelsky, T.M., & Lang, K.A. (2026). SWOT satellite observations of the Kakhovka Dam break flood highlight limitations of outburst flood models. Geophysical Research Letters, 53, e2025GL120832. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL120832

Georgia Tech will play a key role in the newly announced Genesis Mission, a national initiative harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to propel scientific discovery and address challenges in health, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, and national security. The White House announced the first Genesis Mission projects on July 22 as part of a more than $5 billion investment in AI-enabled science and technology. 

Few neuroscientists would dispute that the brain relies on prediction. From houseflies evading swatters to humans catching baseballs, living things are constantly anticipating what comes next. Understanding how the brain generates those predictions could help explain one of neuroscience's most enduring questions: how the brain builds internal models of the world that allow us to learn, adapt, and anticipate what comes next.

“Without actively predicting the world, we cannot survive,” says Farzaneh Najafi, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a faculty affiliate of Georgia Tech's Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society. “There is quite some sensory-motor delay in the processing. We can’t just sit there, wait for the brain to process our environment, and then react.”

Part of the puzzle may lie in signals known as neural ramps. Almost like a drumroll leading up to a big reveal, neurons in some areas of the brain have shown gradual increases in activity immediately before a stimulus appears. For decades, researchers have interpreted this ramping activity as a neural signature of prediction, reflecting anticipation of an upcoming event.

Recently published in Science Advances, a new study from Najafi’s lab reveals these signals may not be “predictions” at all, but instead a way neurons track elapsed time.

“Surprisingly,” says Najafi, “the very first study from my lab called the Predictive Processing Lab showed that no, these are not prediction signals.”

The finding challenges a long-standing interpretation of one of neuroscience's most studied signals and reveals that the search for predictive neurons may lead to different circuits — or require different experiments to uncover. 

The iGEM students are led by Catherine "Kate" Sharer (Chemistry/Biochemistry 1996), who discovered a passion for research as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech. 

“It's a joy to work with these students on real science. Instead of teaching a class, it feels very much like we're running a research lab that also has this competitive aspect to it,” says Sharer. "It's the perfect job I never knew I wanted."

Georgia Tech Beginnings

Sharer’s path to the classroom began in Tech’s chemistry labs. She initially enrolled as a chemical engineering major, before discovering she preferred chemistry and the lab work that went with it.

“I would listen in class and memorize my notes, but I learned the most when I could put chemical theories into practice in the lab,” says Sharer. ”Today, I try to bring that same learning process to my students.”

Summer research positions with Georgia Tech faculty gave her opportunities for hands-on scientific discovery. “Working in labs as a 19-year-old undergraduate made a huge impact on me,” Sharer says. “I absolutely fell in love with research.”

After graduation, she began a Ph.D. program in biochemistry and molecular biology at Emory University and spent about a decade in research labs. During those years, she mentored undergraduate scientists and found her enthusiasm for teaching matched her passion for research.

Realizing she wanted to make teaching a career, she earned a master's degree in secondary education and became a chemistry teacher. Just two years later, iGEM showed her that she didn't have to choose between the classroom and the lab.

Global Acclaim

The iGEM competition brings together students from more than 65 countries to conduct ambitious research aimed at solving real-world problems, culminating in the annual Global Jamboree in Paris.

The Lambert team is internationally recognized. Over the years, they’ve been profiled on 60 Minutes and Georgia Public Broadcasting and earned several competition awards. The 2022 team won the Grand Prize with their project, CADlock, an accessible, early-diagnosis screening test for coronary artery disease that uses microRNA biomarkers.

Nearly 100 students tried out for 10 openings on this year's team. According to Sharer, families move to the Lambert School District to participate. Despite the accolades, Sharer believes the team’s greatest achievement is the growth she sees in her students.

“They gain a lot of soft skills, like being a good team member and an effective communicator,” says Sharer.

Addressing Challenges

Each year the students choose the global issue they’d like to tackle.

The 2025 team developed a Lyme disease diagnostic platform using gene-editing technology, which led to an invitation for students to present their research at a Lyme disease symposium at Johns Hopkins University.

"This wasn’t a competition, this wasn’t on 60 Minutes, this wasn’t for a gold medal. This was my students being part of an important conversation with Lyme disease researchers across the world,” says Sharer. “It really showed them the power of science.”

This year's team is focusing on deformed wing virus in honey bees. Students are exploring synthetic biology approaches that could help protect bee populations critical to agriculture.

“My students are passionate, competitive, and committed to making the world a better place through the research and outreach that they do,” explains Sharer. “They’re wildly creative and ambitious, without any preconceived notions of what they can’t do.”

Beyond the laboratory, Lambert’s iGEM students host a synthetic biology summer camp for middle school students, conduct outreach in local schools, and even deliver virtual lessons to young women in Afghanistan.

All of the iGEM experiences have reinforced Sharer's belief in what young scientists can achieve:

"High school students are capable of independent research, and the more opportunities we can give them for that, the better."

A Georgia Tech Legacy

Like Sharer, the Lambert iGEM team shares strong ties with Georgia Tech.

The team traces its roots to School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Mark Styczynski, who introduced former Lambert teacher, Janet Standeven, to the competition. Since then, Styczynski has remained a dedicated mentor, supporting Lambert students for more than a decade.

“He treats my high school kids like grad students, asking them great questions that make them think about the research," says Sharer.

Other Georgia Tech professors have also offered research guidance and laboratory space.

This year, the students have been working with Jennifer Leavey, principal academic professional, assistant dean for faculty mentoring, and director of the Georgia Tech Urban Honeybee Project.

“I’ve been very impressed with the Lambert iGEM team members,” says Leavey.  “They are approaching the problem of honey bee health from so many different angles — using molecular biology, protein chemistry, technology, and even education. I hope they all become scientists, but even if they don't, I know they will go on to amazing things!”

Coming Full-Circle 

Sharer sees her own educational experience reflected in the opportunities her students have today.

“Everything I was taught at Georgia Tech, my training at Emory, and all of the pieces of my education, I get to transfer into the classroom,” says Sharer.

Many iGEM students leave Lambert and come to Georgia Tech. Esther Lee, a third-year biomedical engineering major, was a member of the Lambert iGEM team in 2022 and is now a volunteer mentor.

“The endurance built from reading papers, troubleshooting, and collaborating with team members to be creative and solve problems helped me push through challenging courses and team-based projects at Tech,” says Lee. “It also encouraged me to join a research lab and continue experimenting.”

Lee speaks highly of her former advisor:

“Ms. Sharer expertly balances encouraging and pushing students to learn, explore, and ideate challenging topics while also keeping realities and timelines in check,” says Lee.

Sharer’s current iGEM students agree:

“She’s a great teacher,” says Brandon Jimerson, a senior member of Lambert’s iGEM team. “She’s really shaped the way I look at science and how it can positively affect the world.”

As many organizations and businesses are turning to AI to improve workplace efficiency, risk remains high. Between overlooked footnotes and misread graphics, small mistakes can have expensive consequences. 

To address this challenge, researchers from Georgia Tech and J.P. Morgan developed SlideAgent. The new framework helps large language models (LLMs) better understand complex visual documents like presentation slide decks, brochures, and reports. 

SlideAgent works by breaking documents into multiple levels, allowing the model to analyze both the big picture and the fine details. This human-inspired approach leads to more accurate and reliable interpretation than existing systems. 

Beyond improving workplace tools, SlideAgent also points to a broader shift in AI. Instead of building only larger and more powerful models, the work shows how smarter design and more efficient reasoning can improve performance. 

“Multimodal LLMs such as GPT, Gemini, and Claude, can save people time and reduce the mental effort required to understand these documents, but they remain imperfect,” said Yiqiao (Ahren) Jin, a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“In high-stakes fields such as finance, for example, misreading a number, overlooking a footnote, or making an incorrect comparison across pages could affect reporting, risk assessment, or strategic decisions.” 

The researchers tested SlideAgent on a wide range of real-world documents, including financial presentations, technical slides, and visual question-answering datasets. 

The system consistently outperformed leading commercial models and open-source tools throughout the evaluation. In some cases, it improved accuracy by up to 10%. The gains were especially strong on more complex tasks, such as comparing information across slides or understanding how visuals relate to each other on a page.

“We found the results very encouraging. SlideAgent reaches an improvement of 7.9% over its proprietary base model and 9.8% over the evaluated open-source base models,” said Jin, the project’s lead researcher. 

“These are meaningful gains given the strength of the underlying multimodal models and the difficulty of the tasks.” 

Current multimodal AI systems often process entire pages at once. This approach can lead to mistakes, such as miscounting items in a chart or overlooking important details in dense visuals.

SlideAgent addresses this by mimicking how people read documents. Instead of treating each page as a single unit, the system looks at information at three levels: the full document, individual pages, and specific elements like charts, tables, and text blocks.

A network of agents, each specialized for a specific level, divides and coordinates analysis. Then, SlideAgent combines outputs to build a structured understanding of the overall document. This allows it to answer questions more accurately and reason across multiple pages.

“The central inspiration was how people naturally read a long presentation,” Jin said.

“We first develop an understanding of the overall narrative, then identify the relevant pages or sections, and finally zoom in on individual charts, tables, or text blocks when precise evidence is needed.”

The work highlights a growing challenge with AI. As systems become more popular and more powerful, users increasingly discover the technology’s limitations. This is especially true for real-world tasks that require structured reasoning and contextual understanding.

SlideAgent shows that better performance does not always come from building bigger models. Instead, it points to smarter ways of organizing how AI processes information that can lead to improvement.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) accepted SlideAgent for presentation at its annual meeting. The 64th ACL 2026 meeting took place July 2-7 in San Diego.

ACL is a scientific and professional organization for researchers in natural language processing (NLP). Its namesake conference is one of the world’s leading venues for presenting NLP research.

ACL 2026 followed a year after Jin completed an internship at J.P. Morgan AI Research, where he worked on SlideAgent. He interned under Rachneet Kaur, Zhen Zeng, and Sumitra Ganesh, all co-authors of the paper. School of CSE Associate Professor Srijan Kumar advises Jin at Georgia Tech.

Along with SlideAgent, Jin authored two other papers accepted at ACL 2026.

“Conferences such as ACL are valuable not only for sharing results, but also for refining future project ideas with the broader community. Discussions across institutions and research areas can reveal limitations, suggest new evaluations, and spark collaborations that are difficult to develop in isolation,” Jin said.

“For SlideAgent, I was particularly interested in feedback on how we can make the framework more computationally efficient without sacrificing accuracy or interpretability.”

This year, Team Blue Water – which features nine Georgia Tech participants –came out on top after three days of intense competition.

“I've competed in DEF CON CTFs for four years now,” said Ph.D. student Kevin Stevens. “After winning second place three years in a row, it's so rewarding to finally achieve first place with such a great team.”

Blue Water finished with 578,103 points, well ahead of second-place team 0x4b52, which scored 454,797 points. SuperDiceCodeLovers took third place with 425,686 points.

The results highlighted Georgia Tech’s strength in the competition. The first-, second-, and third-place teams all included Georgia Tech students or alumni.

Georgia Tech participants on Blue Water included:

• Jalen Chuang, Ph.D. student
• Jiho Kim, Ph.D. student
• Andrew Chin, Ph.D. student
• Youngjoon Kim, postdoctoral researcher
• Kevin Stevens, Ph.D. student
• Yong Hwi Jin, Ph.D. student
• Sunghyeon Jo, Ph.D. student
• Yu-Fu Fu, Ph.D. student
• Gye Jin Lee, Ph.D. student

Blue Water consisted of members from Perfect Blue, Water Paddler, r00timentary, RedBud, BunkyoWesterns, and undef1ned. Combining multiple teams into a single roster is common at DEF CON CTF.

The competition unfolded over three days, with teams competing for about seven hours on each of the first two days and an additional two and a half hours on the final day. However, the work continued beyond the competition's official hours. The teams were allowed to continue working through the evenings and nights to find vulnerabilities, protect their systems, and gain points.

The challenges were designed by the Benevolent Bureau of Birds, the group that had won the competition for the past four years under the team name Maple Mallard Magistrates. The group is a collaboration between Plaid Parliament of Pwning from Carnegie Mellon University, The Duck from Theori Inc., and Maple Bacon from the University of British Columbia.

This year’s bird-themed competition featured a wide range of technical challenges, including escaping game softlocks, programming in a custom bird emoji language, working with a custom computer architecture and using Game of Life patterns for data exfiltration. Other challenges included a bot battleground, protecting the 1994 Netscape Navigator browser, and exploring a reimagined version of the internet built around “bird HTTP” and “bird CSS.”

For Stevens, one of his contributions to the winning effort focused on a new competition mechanic introduced this year, the “rebate mechanic.”

Teams could earn partial points back for flags stolen from them if they recovered those flags from recorded network traffic. Stevens created and maintained a service to manage the new mechanic, adding another layer of strategy to an already complex competition.

The victory adds another accomplishment to Georgia Tech’s growing record in elite cybersecurity competitions, where students regularly apply classroom knowledge and research skills into practice against some of the strongest teams in the field.

“SCP students and their collaborators continue to excel, winning elite cybersecurity competitions, including this year’s CTF at DEF CON,” said Mustaque Ahamad, interim chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP).

“This is because of the excellence of our students and the SCP research projects and courses that prepare them with the advanced knowledge and skills needed to discover and mitigate the most challenging security vulnerabilities in systems on which we all rely.”

The team also found that the new standard's core rules for sending messages and handling errors retain every known security weakness of older versions.

The vulnerabilities could allow an attacker who has already gained access to a vehicle's internal computer network to change or intercept messages, take individual vehicle computers offline, send different information to different systems, or disrupt network communication.

CAN Extra Long (CAN XL), the latest version of the controller area network (CAN), is designed for future cars and other vehicles that need to move large amounts of data between onboard computers. The technology is not yet widely deployed in production vehicles, giving manufacturers an opportunity to address security concerns before it becomes more common.

“Because it isn't widely deployed yet, we have a narrow window to get its security right,” said Associate Professor Saman Zonouz of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, one of the researchers on the project. 

“Fixing a standard now is far easier than fixing it once it's built into the hardware of millions of cars that stay on the road for a decade or more.”

Zonouz said CAN XL is expected to become the primary version of CAN, the network that enables computers inside a vehicle to communicate. It is also expected to serve as the main network for driver-assistance systems in future vehicles.

The researchers confirmed the seven vulnerabilities in commercial CAN XL hardware and demonstrated attacks using a physical test setup that mimics a vehicle network.

Modern vehicles can have dozens of electronic control units that manage systems such as sensors, brakes, steering, and entertainment. These computers need to communicate quickly and reliably.

For decades, many vehicles have used CAN for this communication. However, the original version, known as classic CAN, was not designed to handle the volume of data generated by newer vehicle technologies.

CAN XL was developed to provide faster communication, larger messages, and new security features, but the researchers wanted to know whether the new standard’s basic rules were secure. Their testing revealed that they weren’t. They discovered that an attacker who controls one computer on the network could intercept and replace messages or take a targeted computer offline.

“These flaws are in the standard itself, so every device built to follow it inherits them,” Zonouz said. “With CAN XL, there's still time to fix these problems before they reach the road.”

The attacks would require an attacker to first gain control of a computer connected to the vehicle's internal network. The research does not show that CAN XL itself provides a means to break into a vehicle. Instead, it shows what an attacker could do after gaining access.

Several attacks were also faster and harder to detect than similar attacks against classic CAN, according to the authors.

The researchers proposed changes to the CAN XL rules to prevent several of the attacks. They also recommended additional security measures, including message authentication and systems that can detect unusual activity.

The team reported the vulnerabilities and informed the manufacturers of the commercial devices it tested about the bugs it found. One company has already released a fix. The researchers hope their findings will help manufacturers address security weaknesses before the technology becomes more widely used.

A Formal Security Analysis of CAN XL was published in the Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium, held Aug. 12-14 in Baltimore, MD. The paper was also named a runner-up for a distinguished paper award.

The study was conducted by Georgia Tech Ph.D. student ZhaozhouTang, Professor Vijay Ganesh, Zonouz, and Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Raheem Beyah, along with Khaled Serag of the Qatar Computing Research Institute and Z. Berkay Celik of Purdue University.

The paper and its findings result from projects sponsored by the Hyundai America Technical Center, the Georgia Department of Transportation, and the $7 million CHORUS Center through the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Physical System Frontier Program.

To improve robot performance and advance memory capabilities needed for reliable home use, Georgia Tech researchers have developed a new benchmark to evaluate the memory capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs).

That includes Gemini 2.0-flash and GPT-4o.

In-home assistive robots could clean and organize a home while the owner is away, but without enhanced memory capabilities, they could cause more problems than they solve.

They could, for example, cause a major inconvenience if they move important objects like wallets and keys but are unable to tell the owner where they put them.

A new benchmark created by Georgia Tech researchers tests the memory capability of vision-language models (VLMs), including Gemini 2.0-flash and GPT-4o, to determine whether they could improve robot performance.

Zsolt Kira, an associate professor in Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, said that most active VLMs can process only a few hundred images at a time before forgetting them.

“There wasn’t a benchmark that could test these specialized capabilities that we might want from a robot,” Kira said. “Our purpose in creating one is to spur research in this area so that others can develop methods to solve this problem.”

The team’s benchmark consists of memory evaluations based on 60 tasks that require continuous engagement and contextual and environmental awareness. Three task categories — spatial, temporal, and multi-goal — are highly difficult.

“You can chat with a language model like ChatGPT, and it remembers all the text from your previous conversations with it because the text data is small in terms of storage,” Kira said. 

“Embodied agents and robots observe a lot of videos, and those tend to be a lot harder to recall. If you ask it where your diary is, it must efficiently store images of your diary and where it is.

“That’s just a few frames out of a million that it recorded since yesterday, and it must know where that is relative to the spatial layout of the house.”

Karmesh Yadav, a Ph.D. student in Kira’s lab, said users don’t want to repeat information about their preferences after deployment. They also expect the robot to maintain long-term memory.

“In reality, you would want it to have a memory of the entire time it has been in your house, whether that’s days or years,” Yadav said.

The team’s benchmark evaluates memory performance over an average one-day period. It challenges the models with commands like “navigate to an object you did not interact with yesterday” or “navigate to a room you did not visit yesterday.”

The results show that current state-of-the-art models have a long way to go before they can be used in embodied agents. The best model achieved roughly a 50% success rate on high-level difficulty tasks.

Surprisingly, this model wasn’t Gemini or GPT VLMs. It was an open-source reasoning model from Qwen. 

“If you use an open-source reasoning model, even one that’s small in size, it can match the performance of closed-source non-reasoning models,” Yadav said. “Reasoning models can look at the video and translate it into text. It describes what’s going on in the video in words and determines the right frame to choose in its final output.”

Kira said that converting images into descriptive text that language models easily understand could be one way to circumvent the memory storage dilemma. Another way could be to assign a hierarchy that teaches the model to identify irrelevant or redundant images and erase them from storage.

Whatever future progress researchers make in those areas, Kira and his students are confident that their benchmark will remain relevant. 

“This benchmark is scalable,” said Ph.D. student Yusuf Ali. “If two years from now, videos are easy for a model to understand and store, you can use the same infrastructure we propose and scale up the problem’s difficulty.”

Yadav and Ali are co-first authors of a paper on the benchmark, presented in early September at the 2026 European Conference on Computer Vision in Sweden.

For more information about the project, click here.

Georgia Tech continues to invest in the evolution of its campus, creating spaces that foster innovation, sustainability, and accessibility. This update provides an overview of recent project milestones, upcoming activities, and the ways these efforts support the Institute’s long-term vision for growth and excellence.  

Those costs were 10 times higher than in 2024, according to the study, published in the National Tax Journal.

To project the full-year impact of even steeper tariff hikes enacted later in 2025, the researchers used 2024 as a baseline for a typical year's worth of medical imports. They calculated that under those peak August rates, annual government-assessed duties would skyrocket to $15.8 billion — nearly 30 times higher than historical baselines — resulting in an estimated $8.1 billion in ultimate passed-through costs to the healthcare system.

“The results have nontrivial implications for impacts of tariffs on the fiscal sustainability of health care in the United States,” the authors wrote. “Although the amount of duties collected and passed through the border may seem small in the context of large aggregate U.S. spending on healthcare, increased costs land somewhere in the medical supply chain – incurred by manufacturers, distributors, providers, insurers, and patients.”

The tariffs, first imposed in February 2025, were the first by the Trump administration to include medical supplies and equipment, which traditionally have been excluded from significant tariffs.

Those tariffs were later struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court and replaced by a 10% global tariff that was later, itself, reversed by the U.S. Court of International Trade.

While the study is not the first to calculate the pass-through cost of tariffs to the healthcare sector, the authors say it is the first to build a fully comprehensive database tracking the historical changes, temporary exemptions, and other details of medical tariffs since 2017.

The researchers were also the first to use more granular customs codes to separate the pass-through effects across different categories of medical goods, revealing that final branded products and packaged medications bore a much higher pass-through rate than raw active pharmaceutical ingredients.

 Those revelations suggest that overseas market power and how buyers react to price changes play major roles in keeping pass-through rates high, the researchers said.

More than 40% of pharmaceuticals in dosage form and more than a third of medical devices come from suppliers in four countries, most of which faced substantial tariffs. Such geographic concentration makes it extremely difficult for the healthcare industry to quickly shift sourcing or avoid these tariff costs, the researchers said.

“If production of branded dosage forms and certain types of medical devices tends to be dominated by monopolies or oligopolies with facilities located overseas, these companies could pass the bulk of the cost of the tariff to US importers in response to tariff hikes without fear of losing substantial market share as long as it is difficult for new firms to enter the market,” the authors wrote.

The study was conducted by Kang and UCD coauthors Xiangtao Meng, Katheryn N. Russ, and James Waters. The paper, “Tariffs on Medical Goods: Pass-Through, Geography, and Aggregate Costs to the US Health-Care System,” was first published online on Feb. 27, 2026 in the National Tax Journal. It is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/739621.

The study is timely, arriving amid widespread public discontent over rising fuel prices, with voter frustrations reflected in a series of national polls blaming the Trump administration.

Although the researchers do not determine how much of the price differences across administrations, if any, are caused by presidents themselves, they argue economists may have been too confident in dismissing the possibility without much direct evidence.

“If economists really think that the president doesn't have influence, the burden of proof is on economists to explain that these differences can't be interpreted as the result of each president's actions," Brewer said.

Read the full story.

Spatial scholarship is a research approach focusing on social and humanistic questions, which foreground place, space, spatial data, and human experience.

Held at the Georgia Tech Library, the Spatial Scholarship Field School brought together researchers from eight top academic institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA, NYU, and Georgia Tech, to examine how technology, data, and physical environments shape one another.

Participants shared research, joined in panel discussions with Georgia Tech faculty, and learned interdisciplinary methods such as a variation of body-mapping that uses  wearable environmental sensors to explore how data shaped their felt experience in place.

Watch a video about the Spatial Scholarship Field School on YouTube

"We're really proud to host this Spatial Scholarship Field School — to spend a couple of days together thinking about what it means to take space and place more seriously as part of the scholarship we do," said Yanni Loukissas, an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) and director of IMA.

Co-led by LMC Assistant Professor Richmond Wong, the event challenged scholars to evaluate how local neighborhoods respond to emerging technologies like self-driving cars and data centers.

“We invited participants to walk around with wearable sensors tracking sound, temperature, light, CO2, and air quality, interpreting readings through colored LEDs,” said Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, who helped facilitate the event. Riggs is a 2026 Ph.D. Digital Media graduate who now works as an assistant professor at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“This activity asked participants to focus on critical and interpretive approaches to bio and environmental data, situating themselves within campus environments,” Riggs said.

Stephen Yang, a doctoral candidate at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said the event advanced his thinking on how people experience built environments.

“I’m grateful for the thought-provoking conversations that pushed me to think hard about the taken-for-granted ways built environments are organized,” Yang said. “I left the Field School with many new ideas that I’ll continue to ruminate on.”

IMA is a collaboration between the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the Library. 

The Georgia Institute of Technology hosted a panel and celebration on Sept. 2, 2026, in honor of a historic gift to establish the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Institute for Technology and Civic Leadership. The new interdisciplinary institute, launched earlier this year, is designed to prepare students to navigate the intersection of technology, civic life, and leadership.

At the heart of the new lab is the miniTrashpresso, a compact recycling and manufacturing system developed by the sustainability technology company Miniwiz. The machine can take used plastics and other waste materials, process them locally, and transform them into new products in less than five minutes. By bringing manufacturing and recycling together in a single system, the Trash Lab aims to give the Georgia Tech community a way to explore sustainable design, material reuse, and the future of circular manufacturing.

“The launch of IPaT’s new Trash Lab represents an exciting step forward for sustainability at Georgia Tech,” said Jennifer Chirico, associate vice president of Sustainability. “As a living-learning lab, it provides students and researchers with hands-on opportunities to work alongside campus operations, turning used plastics into valuable new products and creating innovative solutions that support a more circular campus.”

A Makerspace Focused on Circular Innovation

The Trash Lab expands Georgia Tech’s growing network of makerspaces and innovation environments by focusing specifically on waste recovery and reuse. Instead of treating used plastics as disposable materials, the lab encourages users to view them as valuable resources that can be transformed into new products.

The miniTrashpresso represents the latest generation of recycling technology developed by Miniwiz. The company originally launched the world’s first mobile recycling line, known as the Trashpresso, to support communities that lacked access to traditional recycling infrastructure. The newer miniTrashpresso is smaller, more energy-efficient, and more portable, making it suitable for campuses and community-based applications.

The modular system uses industrial equipment, including shredders, presses, and heating technologies, to process materials on-site. Advanced heat-induction presses and specialized molds can quickly transform recovered plastics into new objects and components. The system can also be integrated with AI-powered waste-tracking tools and robotic automation technologies that help identify, sort, and process materials more efficiently.

For IPaT leaders, the Trash Lab represents more than the addition of specialized equipment.

“Community resilience and people-centered sustainability are core research areas within IPaT,” said Michael Best, executive director. “Our new Trash Lab will allow the entire Georgia Tech community to not only think about upcycling and plastic reuse but to make and do innovative projects that directly demonstrate sustainable futures.”

Turning Trash Into a Resource

Miniwiz founder Arthur Huang, who developed the miniTrashpresso system, describes upcycling as a practice rooted in centuries of human ingenuity.

“Upcycling is actually recycling old material and turning that into something new,” Huang said.

Throughout history, societies have reused existing materials in construction, manufacturing, and everyday life. According to Huang, modern waste streams, particularly plastic packaging and electronic waste, represent an enormous and often untapped source of raw materials.

The miniTrashpresso was designed around that idea. Rather than transporting waste long distances to centralized facilities, the system enables materials to be processed where they are collected. By reducing transportation needs and creating opportunities for local manufacturing, decentralized recycling systems can help lower the environmental footprint associated with traditional waste management.

Miniwiz estimates that using recycled materials can reduce embedded energy consumption by 60% to 80% compared with using raw materials. The company has developed more than 1,200 upcycled materials and products from everyday waste streams, including plastics, food packaging, coffee cups, and electronic waste.

Since its introduction, Miniwiz technology has been deployed in communities, campuses, and organizations worldwide, including projects in Taiwan, Italy, Singapore, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. According to Huang, Georgia Tech is installing and operating North America’s first miniTrashpresso recycling machine from Miniwiz.

Building a Community Around Sustainability

The new facility is also intended to serve as a gathering place for interdisciplinary collaboration. Students interested in sustainability, materials science, engineering, design, manufacturing, and public policy will have opportunities to experiment with new ideas while working with researchers and campus partners.

“When Michael Best first pitched the idea of the Trash Lab, I expected there to be interest in a space like this given the general momentum toward sustainable practices on campus, but the level of excitement from students, staff, and faculty has been outstanding,” said Tim Trent, IPaT’s lab director for the Trash, Craft, Prototyping, and Usability Labs.

“This is an opportunity to create a gathering point for sustainability initiatives, act as a catalyst for partnerships, and help strengthen the many amazing networks and projects already present on campus,” he said. “The IPaT Innovation Labs have a continuous focus on supporting the overall Georgia Tech research enterprise, and I’m happy we are adding another piece to the portfolio.”

As the Trash Lab opens its doors, members of the Georgia Tech community will be invited to explore how waste materials can be reimagined as resources, prototypes, and products. By combining makerspace culture, advanced recycling technology, and sustainability research, the lab offers a tangible demonstration of how circular economy principles can move from theory into practice.

For Georgia Tech, the Trash Lab is not simply a place to recycle plastic. It is a space where innovation, design, and sustainability intersect, helping transform discarded materials into opportunities for learning, discovery, and impact.
 

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For more information about the Trash Lab, contact the IPaT Innovation Labs at ipat-labs@groups.gatech.edu.

For decades, immunologists have known that the body's most durable defenses depend on plasma cells, the antibody-producing cells responsible for long-term immune memory. Long after an infection has passed or a vaccine has been administered, these cells continue releasing protective antibodies, sometimes for decades. 

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Over five years, researchers tracked nearly 7,000 households across 154 Mumbai settlements to determine which strategies most effectively helped residents secure water connections. They found that helping residents navigate the application process — while also organizing community advocacy — increased official water connections by 45% compared to households that received no assistance.

“There have been many studies looking at just using administrative assistance to help communities get water access,” said Anjali Thomas, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, director of the Global Development Program, and co-lead author of the study. “But combining this with community organizing, which helped people also exert their voice, was unique to our study.”

Thomas and collaborator Nikhar Gaikwad, an assistant professor at Columbia University, published the findings in the American Journal of Political Science, long ranked among the top three journals in the discipline.

Navigating Bureaucracy and Building Voice

The researchers first examined why so few residents applied for water connections. Residents were often unaware that recent policy changes had made them eligible for water connections and didn’t bother applying. The municipal corporation also only accepted online applications, and many residents didn’t have access to computers. Additionally, applications required onerous documentation, including tenant or land titles, plumbers’ approvals, and other proof-of-eligibility deeds. To address these barriers, the research team worked with an extensive team of nongovernmental organization workers to help residents gather required documents, complete applications, and navigate bureaucratic follow-up requests.

The second intervention focused on community advocacy. Researchers helped residents organize through WhatsApp groups, petitions, public awareness campaigns, and facilitated group visits to bureaucrats and elected officials’ offices to press for water access.

“Our community advocacy intervention helped citizens convey their collective water access demands to elected politicians,” said Gaikwad. “Local elected politicians are important actors because they help bureaucrats understand citizen needs, prioritize competing demands, and coordinate complex interagency work.”

The study’s most important finding was that neither intervention was effective on its own. Meaningful gains occurred only when administrative support and community advocacy were combined.

“Administrative assistance got citizens through the paperwork, but actually getting the water turned on took collective public pressure,” Thomas said. “Interestingly, we find that this pressure worked only in the period before local elections, when politicians were most motivated to respond.”

The finding suggests that improving access to public services often requires more than helping residents navigate government systems. Communities may also need the collective ability to demand action from decision-makers. 

A Large-Scale Effort

Conducting a study of this scale required a large team. Thomas and Gaikwad partnered with local nonprofit organizations that deployed hundreds of community workers, survey enumerators, and students across participating settlements. The researchers personally visited many neighborhoods multiple times during the five-year project.

Thomas also spent time in India and witnessed the impact firsthand.

“I was in the field when one of the pipes was being laid, and people from the community all circled around and were watching,” Thomas said. “My research assistant and I felt the gratitude from the community.”

For Thomas, moments like that underscore the broader lesson of the project: expanding access to essential services often requires both helping people navigate bureaucracy and empowering them to make their voices heard. 

“These findings offer vital lessons for sustainable development initiatives worldwide,” she said.

Gaikwad agreed.

“While our study provided novel evidence to test and advance our theoretical understanding of the barriers that marginalized citizens face in accessing core government services, the real-world impact of our interventions in Mumbai’s informal settlements was also an important contribution of our study,” he said. “We believe there are important lessons for governmental and nongovernmental organizations working on service delivery in a wide range of informal settlements that also lack essential services across the Global South.”

This research was funded by Evidence in Governance and Politics, the Department for International Development, Columbia University, and Georgia Tech’s Neal Family Endowment.

CITATION: Gaikwad, Nikhar, and Thomas, Anjali. (2026). “Getting on the grid: A field experiment on bottom-up political pressure and access to essential public services.” American Journal of Political Science 1–22.

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.70068.

The CHORUS (Community Hubs for Optimizing Resilience) project will collaborate with coastal communities in Georgia and New York and will be split into two pieces: technology development and community engagement. 

“We’re not just building a simulator and hoping it fits the needs of coastal residents,” explains Alex Robel, project leader and Jean “Chris” Purvis Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "By collaborating with community partners from the very beginning, we can ensure that what we ultimately develop will be effective because the people who will be using it are helping design it.”

Putting Flood Modeling in Residents' Hands

The technology development component will include faculty from the College of Sciences and the College of Computing. The College of Sciences team will develop an AI-based flood simulator and the College of Computing team led by Josiah Hester, associate professor and Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early Career Professor, will create a web platform that allows users to visualize potential flood impacts.

Traditional flood models can take hours or days to generate results and often require specialized expertise and expensive computing resources. The CHORUS platform will be designed to provide easy-to-understand results in seconds, producing building-scale flood maps that show how water moves through streets, yards, and structures during a range of flooding scenarios. Researchers will use the model to test how specific interventions, such as seawalls, restored marshes, or improved stormwater infrastructure, could affect flooding.

Eventually, users will be able to test their own scenarios through the browser-based tool, enabling them to explore how different decisions could change flood impacts in their communities:

“Users will be able to go into a web browser and indicate where a sea wall could go or change a parking lot into a porous vegetated landscape, then click simulate. Within a few seconds, they’ll have a new flood map showing the impacts of these interventions,” says Robel.

A Community-Driven Approach

A collaborative effort with the New York Climate Exchange, the project will be funded by Georgia Sea Grant and IBM, with support from Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow (GT2), Georgia Tech’s Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub, and the National Sea Grant College Program. The CHORUS project is an initiative of the New York Climate Exchange, where Georgia Tech is a core partner institution.

Community engagement in Georgia is being led by CEAR and the Pin Point Betterment Association, which represents descendants of the historic Gullah Geechee community near Savannah. In New York, the project team is partnering with the New York Climate Exchange and the Waterfront Alliance to work with communities surrounding Jamaica Bay.

“What makes this partnership meaningful is that it puts community voices at the center,” says Jasmine Smith, president of the Pin Point Betterment Association. “Too often, decisions are made to ‘better’ communities without actually involving the people who live there. We hope this partnership can serve as a blueprint for how communities are included in future sustainability projects from the very beginning.”

The project includes community advisory boards and technical advisory boards in both locations. Community members will help identify priority assets, select flood scenarios for analysis, and shape the design of the web-based tool. They’ll also test and offer feedback. Technical advisory boards made up of local officials, planners, and other experts will help evaluate the feasibility of proposed solutions.

“The aim is to blend information from both groups without allowing the technical perspective to override community priorities,” says Robel.

According to Robel, giving communities direct access to flood modeling tools can help close the gap between public input and infrastructure planning.

“We are putting decision making in the hands of the community. With a tool like this, the community can say: ‘We want to prevent flooding at this community center, this school, or this road,’” says Robel. “They can run the model, produce data, and present it to local governments or the Army Corps of Engineers  — advocating for potential solutions themselves rather than relying on outside experts.”

Robel sees this project as just the beginning:

“Funded by two-year grants, CHORUS is meant to be a pilot for how this kind of community-centered project can be done. Once we understand some of the challenges and opportunities involved, it will hopefully make it easier for us to scale this work to additional community partners.”

About Community-Engaged Research at Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech is actively working to foster more projects that foster community engagement. Collaborative groups at Georgia Tech involved in the CHORUS project include:

• The CEAR Hub, part of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and housed at the Georgia Tech Savannah campus, advances community-engaged research and planning throughout coastal Georgia, helping communities build resilience to environmental and climate challenges. 
• The Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education (SCoRE) trains faculty, students, and staff in best practices for conducting community-engaged research as well as facilitating connections directly with communities.
• The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) houses SCoRE and is Georgia Tech’s point of contact to the New York Climate Exchange. BBISS forms partnerships like these to fulfill its mission to expand the reach and impact of Georgia Tech’s sustainability research. 

The agreement was signed during a Sept. 14 visit by PNNL leadership to Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility. It builds on years of successful collaboration between researchers at the two institutions. 

The enhanced collaboration has three primary goals: solving big problems through multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research; sustaining and engaging human capital by creating opportunities for students, faculty, researchers, and interns to work on complex real-world challenges; and accelerating technology adoption by taking scientific discoveries and innovations into industry and the federal marketplace.

"Strengthening our partnerships with national laboratories is a strategic priority for Georgia Tech,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech. "PNNL is an outstanding partner, and we look forward to deepening connections among our researchers and students, expanding opportunities and access to world-class capabilities and facilities, and advancing discovery, innovation, and national impact together."

PNNL is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that advances scientific discovery and innovations that support reliable energy, national security, and economic competitiveness. Georgia Tech is one of the nation's leading research universities, conducting more than $1.5 billion in research annually and pursuing a mission to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

"PNNL and Georgia Tech have a long history of working together," said Deb Gracio, laboratory director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “This agreement provides the foundation to take on difficult research challenges and to leverage our complementary expertise and investments in the years ahead.”

The Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) has played a central role in advancing Georgia Tech's engagement with the national laboratory system and connecting researchers with partnership opportunities.

"As SEI takes on a greater role in coordinating Georgia Tech's national laboratory partnerships, this agreement with PNNL demonstrates how we are building stronger pathways for faculty, researchers, and students to engage with world-class national lab capabilities," said Yuanzhi Tang, SEI executive director.

The National Laboratory Partnership Program supports engagement between Georgia Tech and the U.S. national laboratories. SEI now leads the program, with ongoing support from Georgia Tech’s Office of the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research. The agreement with PNNL is the first formal agreement established through the program since its transition to SEI.

"This MOU formalizes and strengthens relationships that have been growing for many years," said Scott McWhorter, SEI director of national laboratory partnerships. “It leverages the unique strengths of Georgia Tech and PNNL and provides a framework for expanding engagement across areas of mutual interest.”

Georgia Tech and PNNL bring complementary strengths in energy and environmental systems, electric grid resilience, cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, alternative fuels and advanced materials, biofuels, radiation detection, data science and visual analytics, nuclear nonproliferation, and national security. These capabilities will be brough together through two upcoming Genesis Mission projects.

Bill Pike, PNNL's deputy director for Science and Technology, who joined the laboratory’s leadership delegation for the MOU signing, said the projects reflect the growing partnership and expanding collaboration between the two institutions. 

About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's leading research universities, with strengths spanning engineering, computing, science, business, design, and the liberal arts. With more than $1.5 billion annually in research awards across its Colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech is among the nation's most research-intensive universities. The Institute's mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

About Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on its distinguishing strengths in chemistry, Earth sciences, biology and data science to advance scientific knowledge and address challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Saman Zonouz, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is helping address those concerns as a member of a planning committee for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Since May 2026, Zonouz has served on the planning committee for an upcoming public workshop on integrating AI into the electricity system. The workshop is scheduled for Oct. 26 and will convene experts to discuss how to safely and reliably use AI across the power grid.

The workshop will explore how AI is used today, the challenges of integrating AI into existing power systems, and how people and AI can work together. The event will also examine relationships between AI and cybersecurity, data centers, workforce development, and future research.

For Zonouz, cybersecurity and resilience are key parts of the conversation.

“AI is both a shield and a target for the grid,” Zonouz said.

Zonouz leads Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Systems Security Research Laboratory. The lab’s research, much of it funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, investigates how AI can protect power systems from cyberattacks.

One recent initiative combines AI with detailed knowledge about power system operations to detect attacks in near real time. Another project sought to identify security weaknesses in solar inverters and other devices that connect energy sources, such as solar panels, to the power grid.

Regardless of the challenge, Zonouz and his lab work to identify and fix these weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. Despite their best efforts, however, Zonouz said that some AI tools meant to secure a system can create new ways for attackers to target a power grid.

The lab has demonstrated in several studies that AI systems can be tricked by false or manipulated data. Attackers can also target the software and systems that AI depends on. As AI becomes more advanced, some systems may even be able to modify grid operations.

This raises an important question: What happens if an AI system fails or is attacked?

“That is why the right frame is resilience,” Zonouz said.

For Zonouz, the goal is not to create an AI system that can never fail or be attacked. It’s to build a trustworthy power grid that can continue operating safely even if an AI system fails or is compromised.

Zonouz will bring his perspective to the National Academies workshop. In addition to helping organize the event, he will lead a session on cybersecurity and resilience. He will also help summarize the workshop’s key takeaways during the closing session. The workshop will be held virtually in late October.  

“Lessons learned from the electricity grid can be applied to other critical infrastructure as AI monitoring and control tools continue to advance and become more common,” he said.

Now, researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have discovered that delivering LNP medicines directly to various areas of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract — from the cheeks to the stomach to the rectum — could alter where the therapies travel in the body after being absorbed. This enables more precise targeting and opens new possibilities for mRNA therapies and vaccines.

Several technologies are currently in development that enable oral and GI nucleic acid delivery, including pills, patches, and endoscopic injections. 

"Here we show that oral delivery of mRNA wouldn’t just enhance the patient experience compared to injections, but it also may enable improved or even completely new treatments," said Alex Abramson, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE).

"We're able to deliver to organs that are hard to target via traditional administration methods while simultaneously reducing uptake in organs normally associated with toxicity."

The researchers published their findings in ACS Nano in September.

Delivery Direction

Typically, LNPs are delivered subcutaneously or intravenously, but that can mean the drugs affect more than just the intended target. Drug interactions with organs such as the liver, lungs, and spleen can cause unwanted side effects that limit how much medicine can be administered. The researchers found that delivering LNPs to different regions of the GI tract changed where the nanoparticles traveled in the body, allowing them to reach targets like the pancreas and lymph nodes while reducing targeting to the liver, lungs, and spleen. 

"We found that the LNP was completely safe at a very high dose when delivered via a gastric route of administration," said Abdulraouf Abbas, a Ph.D. student in James Dahlman's Emory lab. Dahlman is a McCamish Early Career Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory School of Medicine.

"What's really exciting about not affecting the liver and the lungs is that it may allow us to increase the dose without increasing the side effects," Abramson said.

Even better, if the goal is vaccination, the dose could be smaller because the therapy is delivered more directly to the desired target. "Not only are we potentially improving LNP benefits by changing how it is administered, but we could even potentially decrease the cost of those mRNA vaccines or mRNA drugs," said Ramy Ghanim, a ChBE Ph.D. student.

Different Routes, Different Results

Using mouse models, the researchers mapped where nanoparticles traveled after microneedle injections delivered them to different parts of the GI tract. Once they identified which organs received the therapy, they could begin exploring potential medical applications. 

"If you're designing mRNA for a vaccine, then you want to prioritize targeting the lymph nodes. We saw in that case that delivering to the cheek matched or improved the immune response of a vaccine compared to a traditional injection," Ghanim said. "But just because that route is optimal for that application doesn't mean one solution fits all applications."

For example, delivery through the stomach was particularly useful for targeting the pancreas. The researchers also showed that delivering glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) mRNA doses through the stomach improved blood sugar regulation in mouse models. GLP-1 medications are potent treatments used to treat obesity and diabetes.

The researchers hope to test more disease models in the future and eventually bring this technology into the clinic to help patients.

This work was funded in part by: The Georgia Research Alliance and Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance’s 2023 Regenerative Engineering Medicine pilot grant co-awarded to Dahlman and Abramson labs, Lakshmi and Subramonian Shankar Fellowship and Diabetes Translational Accelerator, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigators' Research Award grant R35GM150689, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

CITATION: Abdulraouf M. Abbas, Ramy Ghanim, Sebastian Rudden, David Schultz, Bora Jang, Avraham Shakked, Hyejin Kim, James E. Dahlman, Alex Abramson; Targeted Gastrointestinal Delivery of mRNA Lipid Nanoparticles Enables Systemic Vaccination and Glucagon-like Peptide-1 Metabolic Therapy. ACS Nano 2026; https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.5c18549

Before a promising new therapy can reach a patient, researchers need to answer a deceptively simple question: Will it work? 

And, for some, the rent rises.

Long after a natural disaster fades from the headlines, economic aftershocks can still push people out of their communities, not because their homes were destroyed, but because they can no longer afford to remain there.

A new Georgia Tech-led study found that rents were 6.5% to 12.5% higher than expected four years after a disaster. Similar communities that weren’t hit did not see the same jump.

Brian An, an associate professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy within the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and his team studied two decades of rental housing data and federal disaster records from California and Florida. 

“We often think of housing as a market that will sort itself out,” An said. “But a natural disaster is not a normal market condition. Housing is destroyed. People are displaced. In those moments, renters can become especially vulnerable.”

After a disaster, the housing market’s usual rules no longer apply. Damaged apartment buildings mean reduced supply. Displaced homeowners enter the rental market while their homes are repaired or rebuilt. Construction, repairs, and insurance all get more expensive.

The largest rent increases followed hurricanes and wildfires more than earthquakes, flooding, and tornadoes. For communities hit repeatedly, each new storm or fire added more rent pressure. 

More Demand, Less Room

“When rents go up after a disaster, we're not talking about a small segment of housing,” An said. “We're talking about the broader rental market. That means the effects reach far beyond the homes that were damaged.”

For renters, the consequences extend beyond monthly housing costs. Higher rents can make it harder for families to remain close to support networks. Children may have to change schools. Workers may face longer commutes. Longtime residents can find themselves priced out of communities they helped build.

The findings point to a central tension in disaster recovery: Rebuilding homes is not the same as keeping communities intact.

A Different Path Home

Not every community experienced the same outcome.

Areas that received federal support through Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds saw smaller rent increases than similar communities that did not. The money can be used to build and preserve affordable rental housing, giving residents more options as their communities recover.

An said the study cannot prove that funding alone caused rents to rise more slowly. But the pattern suggests that recovery resources may shape who can afford to stay in a community once rebuilding begins.

Rebuilding Lives, Not Just Homes

As communities face repeated hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters, An believes policymakers need to think differently about recovery. That could mean investing in more resilient housing, expanding affordable rental options, and strengthening protections for renters after disasters strike.

“Everyone needs a place to live,” An said. “As disasters become more frequent, housing can't be an afterthought in recovery.”

An’s research is published in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

In a landmark study published in Nature, 11 researchers tracked the impacts on the carbon cycle across the Mississippi watershed and its 11 states after almost a century of liming. The results show that while liming can initially release carbon, it becomes a carbon sink after a few decades, effectively removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

“Farmers have been doing enhanced weathering in U.S. agriculture for a little over a half century,” said Chris Reinhard, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and an author on the paper. “This is a giant natural experiment that's been going on for decades that allows us to figure out how much carbon makes it all the way through the watershed system."

The study grew out of a U.S. Department of Energy Earthshot Initiative grant focused on understanding the role agricultural liming could play in long-term carbon removal.

Tracking Carbon

When limestone or other carbonate minerals are added to soil, the effects don't stop at the field's edge. The minerals’ reaction with the ground’s acidity results in chemical products that move through rivers and eventually reach the ocean. While carbon-related changes can be measured in the field, tracing them across an entire watershed is far more difficult.

But data from decades of agricultural lime applications, fertilizer usage numbers, and river alkalinity measurements at the mouth of the Mississippi helped researchers piece together the larger picture. By analyzing more than a century of agricultural and river records, the team found that liming in the Mississippi River Basin has acted as a net carbon sink.

The findings also challenge how liming's climate impacts are typically measured. Current carbon accounting often treats lime application itself as a source of emissions. But the researchers say this approach misses an important part of the picture: Fertilizers can make soils more acidic over time, creating the need for liming. When the team accounted for both processes, they found that liming removed carbon in the long term, but fertilizer causes acidity and drives emissions. 

Modeling a Better Future

Reinhard and colleagues also created a model that captures the physics and chemistry of agricultural soils. The model can determine liming’s theoretical carbon-removal potential, testing its predictions against the historical data. In this case, about 90% of the carbon-removal benefit predicted from the model ultimately appeared in the records of river chemistry from the Mississippi River Basin. 

“The long-term goal for the model is to develop a way for farmers to plan and be able to answer questions like, ‘How do I stagger the application of lime so I'm helping the crops while also emitting as little carbon as possible?’” Reinhard said.

Beyond its climate implications, liming could help strengthen the long-term resilience of the agricultural industry. The findings suggest that managing soil pH can improve soil health and crop yields, while simultaneously reducing net greenhouse gas emissions. If managed well, one of agriculture's oldest soil management practices may offer a rare double benefit: helping farmers grow healthier crops while reducing the industry's climate footprint.

CITATION : Suhrhoff, T.J., Reinhard, C.T., Kanzaki, Y. et al. Agricultural liming is a carbon sink in the Mississippi River Basin. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11040-2

His paper, “Brain Speaks Louder Than Words: Neurophysiological Opinion Inference via Cognitive Dissonance Triggers,” recently received the 2026 Dr. Hermann Zemlicka Award for the most visionary paper at the NeuroIS Retreat. 

Wu discusses the research, its potential applications, and the ethical and privacy considerations it raises.

Q&A With D.J. 

What was your reaction when you learned your paper received the 2026 Dr. Hermann Zemlicka Award for “most visionary” research?

The Dr. Hermann Zemlicka Award is presented annually at the NeuroIS Retreat to the paper selected as the year’s “most visionary.” I was surprised and deeply honored to receive it. The recognition was especially meaningful because it affirmed our vision of bringing neuroscience and information systems research together to explore a new way of understanding human opinions.

For readers unfamiliar with your research, what problem were you trying to solve?

We wanted to find a better way to understand people’s opinions in situations where traditional methods, like surveys or tracking behavior, may be biased, intrusive, slow, or difficult to use. Our research explores whether brief brain activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG) can reveal when a statement matches or conflicts with a person’s beliefs. If so, it could provide another way to understand opinions without relying only on what people say or how they behave.

Most people are used to answering surveys, reviews, and polls. What made you wonder if there might be a better way to understand what people really think?

Surveys are extremely useful, but they depend on people actively participating. Those answers can be shaped by factors such as memory, the way a question is worded, social pressure, or a person’s ability and willingness to respond. We wondered whether brain activity could offer another way to understand people’s opinions, especially in situations where those challenges come into play. We wanted to see whether we could capture an immediate reaction before a person has to translate it into words.

The paper title, “Brain Speaks Louder Than Words,” is interesting. Can you give an example of what that means in everyday life?

Imagine someone is asked to rate the statement, “I like this product or service.” Even if they feel pressure to give a positive answer, their brain may respond differently depending on whether the statement matches their experience. Our method looks for patterns of brain activity that occur when there is a mismatch between what a person truly believes and what they are evaluating. It is not mind-reading or lie detection. Instead, it uses the brain’s response to conflicting information as one signal that may help us understand whether a statement reflects someone’s genuine opinion.

Were there any findings that surprised you or challenged what you expected going into the project?

One finding was that cognitive conflict depended on more than whether a statement contradicted someone’s opinion. When a heuristic cue, a simple signal that offers a mental shortcut, was present, the brain response to a conflicting statement became weaker. Put intuitively, some contextual cues can soften our immediate sense that “this does not match what I believe,” even when our underlying opinion remains unchanged.

Privacy is a growing concern in today's digital world. Can you compare the privacy implication of the proposed approach versus the traditional methods?

Our approach could reduce the need to store information such as browsing histories, ratings, or written survey responses. Instead of continuously tracking a person’s behavior, it focuses on collecting a specific brain response during a defined interaction with the user’s consent.

At the same time, brain activity is sensitive biometric information and could reveal more than what is needed for a particular task. Any privacy benefits therefore depend on robust safeguards, including data minimization, meaningful informed consent, clearly defined limits on data use and retention, and strong data security through offline, locally controlled processing and calibration.

Our study offers some initial guidance on these issues, but more research is needed to fully understand the privacy implications of this approach.

How could this research change the way organizations understand customers, employees, or other stakeholders in real time?

In situations where surveys may not tell the whole story, receiving feedback is difficult, or past behavioral data are unavailable, our research could eventually help organizations better understand how people are reacting in near real time. For example, it could help identify whether stakeholders' immediate responses suggest agreement or disagreement with a message, product, digital experience, or decision.

These insights would not replace surveys. Instead, they could complement them by showing where people's immediate reactions align with, or differ from, what they later report. Any use at the individual level, however, would require informed consent, a clearly defined purpose, and strong privacy safeguards.

The paper points to opportunities for helping people who may have difficulty communicating through traditional methods. What possibilities do you see for making technology more inclusive?

Brain-computer interfaces have already shown promise in helping people with severe motor or communication impairments interact with technology. Our research explores one possible way to better understand a person's opinions or preferences through brain activity during specific tasks. Over time, this type of work could contribute to technologies that are more responsive to individual needs and more accessible for people who face challenges communicating through traditional methods.

For readers who haven’t thought about neuroscience or brain-computer interfaces before, what’s the one takeaway you hope they remember from this research?

Brain signals do not provide a direct window into a person's thoughts. They reflect many different processes happening in the brain and body, which means they can be difficult to interpret.

That is why theory and experimental design matter. Rather than searching brain data for patterns without a clear explanation, our research focuses on a specific mechanism: how people respond to information that conflicts with their beliefs. By testing that idea in a controlled setting and calibrating the approach for each individual, we can make the results more meaningful and easier to interpret.

Learn More: Information Technology Management

A film production crew will be at the Blake R. Van Leer Building and the Campus Recreation Center (CRC) from Wednesday, Sept. 23, through Tuesday, Sept. 29, with operations beginning as early as 5 a.m. and concluding as late as 10 p.m. During this time, community members should allow extra travel time when moving through these areas due to crew activity and production vehicles. 

The challenge gives participants an opportunity to set up teams for their workplace, encourage each other to ride, and win prizes for participation and mileage. Last year, a Georgia Tech team won the citywide challenge. 

It’s also a chance to learn about or get reacquainted with on-campus cycling resources. That includes a virtual Ride Smart class and monthly in-person group rides. Learn more. 

Georgia Tech has long been a great place to ride, and in 2024, it earned renewed recognition as a gold-level Bicycle Friendly University. Campus bicycle infrastructure took a major step forward last fall with the opening of the Ferst Drive cycle track, which provides a bidirectional path separated from vehicular traffic. And, with last year's opening of a bike shop in the Campus Recreation Center, riders can get help with repairs, parts, and maintenance right on campus. (Not to mention Atlanta's recent inclusion in The New York Times' 5 Great North American Biking Cities.)

To learn more about campus bicycling resources, including maps and other information, visit the Parking and Transportation Services website. And get on your bikes and ride!

The ribbon-cutting ceremony marks the completion of a project years in the making. The facility brings together the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Scheller College of Business in a shared environment designed to encourage collaboration among students, faculty, researchers, entrepreneurs, and industry partners. 

The building reflects Georgia Tech’s belief that many of the challenges facing Georgia and the nation require expertise from multiple fields. From advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence to healthcare, supply chains, and entrepreneurship, the next generation of leaders must understand both technology and business — and know how to work across disciplines. 

The project was made possible through support from the state of Georgia and the extraordinary generosity of Georgia Tech alumni and their families: Bill and Penny George, Ernest “Ernie” Scheller, and H. Milton “Milt” Stewart and Carolyn Stewart. Their leadership investments, along with the support of many other donors who contributed to the facility, reflect a shared commitment to generations of engineers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators who will help shape Georgia’s future. 

“People will notice the striking architecture, the classrooms, and the technology inside the new towers,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “What matters most is what that design enables — the learning and exchange of ideas between students, the multidisciplinary collaborations between engineering and business faculty, and the support of innovation and entrepreneurship at the heart of Tech Square. We are grateful to the Georges, the Schellers, the Stewarts, and all our donors for their truly transformative investment, which will make our signature innovation district even more vibrant.”  

Located in the heart of Tech Square, George Tower | Scheller Tower strengthens connections between Georgia Tech and the companies, startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs that make Atlanta one of the nation’s leading innovation communities. By bringing education, research, and industry closer together, the building creates more opportunities for ideas to move into the marketplace and benefit communities across Georgia and beyond. 

The building also reflects the kind of engineering Georgia Tech teaches. Designed for the next 50 years, George Tower | Scheller Tower incorporates advanced systems and sustainable design strategies that significantly reduce energy and water use, lower environmental impact, and create efficient, flexible spaces for learning and collaboration. The project recently earned LEED Platinum certification, the highest level awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council, and a 4 Peach rating, the highest rating through the Georgia Peach Green Building Rating System administered by the Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission. The Georgia Peach Program recognizes state-owned and state-managed buildings that demonstrate excellence in energy efficiency, sustainable construction, environmental stewardship, and resource conservation. 

George Tower | Scheller Tower represents more than an investment in Georgia Tech. It is an investment in Georgia — one that will pay dividends through the talent, discoveries, and partnerships created here for generations to come. 

At Georgia Tech, creativity has always been essential to discovery. 

Avant South returns to Tech Square on Oct. 12 – 13 to convene founders, executives, policymakers, investors, researchers, creators, and students to focus on the intersection of technology, culture, and innovation.

This year’s theme, AI in Action, moves beyond predictions about what artificial intelligence might someday do to examine how organizations are putting it to work today. Faculty and researchers will hear directly from industry leaders about the problems companies are trying to solve with AI and where new research and partnerships are needed. Students can gain a clearer understanding of how AI is changing the careers they are preparing for and connect with employers, founders, and technology leaders. And staff and professionals from across campus can explore how the technology is changing their own fields.

Sessions will take the form of panel discussions, keynotes, and fireside chats. Attendees can experience emerging technologies firsthand with AI activations and simulations, watch entrepreneurs compete in a student founder pitch competition, and connect with leaders from across Atlanta’s technology and innovation ecosystem.

“Avant South offers a chance to connect what happens in classrooms, research labs, and startups across campus with the communities and industries being transformed by AI,” said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “Whether AI becomes a transformative force for good or a threat depends on what we do to advance it and use it. This year's program brings together a diverse group of leaders to reflect together on how we can create a better future with AI from right here in Atlanta and beyond." 

Members of the Tech community can take advantage of a discounted price of $10 per ticket. Register here and use code CAMPUS at check out. 

Continuing to earn distinction for its academic strength and providing a strong return on investment, Georgia Tech is the No. 5 public school (No. 27 overall) on Forbes’ 2027 list of America’s Best Colleges. 

But after more than a decade in the corporate world, Doetsch’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to VinoBarrel, where he serves as vice president of technology. The startup, launched in 2022, combines software, hardware, and data to help restaurants, bars, hotels, and other venues build customer relationships through wine.

The company builds technology-enabled wine dispensers housed in upcycled bourbon barrels. Customers can use a key fob or an integrated tablet to access their profiles, redeem offers, and pour wine. The system enables operators to track customer activity and manage loyalty programs.

For Doetsch, the unusual blend of tech and wine was part of the appeal when he first learned about VinoBarrel from its founder, fellow GT alumnus Seth Lytle (IE 2003).

“I saw the product at Tech Alpharetta (Tech North Atlanta), and I told Seth, ‘This is awesome. It looks like you’re collecting a lot of valuable data, but you don’t have a platform for people to view it,’” said Doetsch, who grew up in Alpharetta, GA.

He was impressed by Lytle’s vision for the company and decided to invest. In addition to funding, he consulted for the company part-time. Earlier this year, however, Doetsch left Capital One for a full-time role at VinoBarrel.

“I realized I could just build this myself,” he said. “Corporate life is not for me. I was ready to leave Capital One and move on to a smaller business startup where I could have a bigger impact.”

A Career Built on Curiosity

Doetsch’s path to VinoBarrel began as a Georgia Tech CS major who interned with a software company. The internship led to a job offer after graduation. Doetsch worked for the company for 10 years as a software developer, senior developer, team lead, and ultimately a manager.

The experience gave him more than technical skills. Working closely with the company’s founder exposed Doetsch to the business side of software: how a company is built, how it grows, and what happens when an owner decides to sell.

“That gave me a ton of entrepreneurial insights,” he said.

Doetsch left the company to start his own. He co-founded Lemony Learning, a financial literacy education company, in 2022. The platform provides resources to help K-12 teachers teach students about personal finance.

He sold the company in 2024 but retains an equity stake and serves as an advisor.

Putting Computing to Work in an Unexpected Industry

At VinoBarrel, Doetsch oversees the technology that powers the business. He develops the software platform that customers use to configure barrels, create loyalty clubs and coupons, and analyze sales and customer data. He is also modernizing some of the company’s internal systems.

The barrels are manufactured locally from upcycled bourbon barrels. Inside, they contain refrigeration, kegs, plumbing, electronics, and software.

“There’s so much left to build,” he said.

VinoBarrel is focused on expanding its customer base. In addition to new locations opening soon in Midtown Atlanta near the Georgia Tech campus, the company regularly demos at restaurants and venues across metro Atlanta, including events at Truist Park. 

“The company is really taking off,” said Lytle. “We have several early adopters, the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center is evaluating our product, and we have a follow-up meeting with a global airport concessions operator.”

“Our immediate goals are to gain support from high net-worth investors – ideally with restaurant or hospitality experience, continue advancing our technology, and grow our client base.”

Finding Opportunity in Computing

Despite the demands of working at a startup, Doetsch finds time to stay connected to Georgia Tech and the College of Computing.

He recently mentored a student team in an entrepreneurship-focused CS design capstone, during which the team developed a tool to help manage and forecast AWS cloud costs. He says he enjoys working with students because it’s an opportunity to share lessons he’s learned.

“It just feels like the right thing to do. I was given a lot. I was helped by a lot of people. So, it seems like the ethically right thing to do, to come back and give back.

RELATED: GT Computing Alumni Hub

He also sees staying connected with fellow alumni as a practical part of building a career.

“Meeting fellow computer science alumni, you might find a good partner, and you might also find a customer or an investor,” he said.

For students interested in entrepreneurship, Doetsch offers a perspective shaped by his experience with startups and established companies.

“As a Georgia Tech student, you have access to immense resources and support from Tech overall and also specifically from the College of Computing,” he said.

“However, it's up to you to be proactive in using the resources available to you. Be intentional about what you choose to pursue, because you can have anything, but you can't have everything.”

Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the launch of Foundry School, a national advanced manufacturing education initiative led by Stanford University in partnership with Georgia Tech and six other universities. At Tech, the program will bring industry experts and leaders from advanced manufacturing companies to campus for talks with students about what it takes to build and operate world-class manufacturing enterprises.

The initiative comes as the United States works to expand domestic manufacturing capacity and address a growing need for skilled workers. The State Department estimates American manufacturers will need to fill 3.8 million jobs by 2033 across industries including semiconductors, defense, and energy.

For Tech, that national effort builds on work already underway across the Institute.

Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) recently expanded to 60,000 square feet, creating a next-generation environment where industry, researchers, and students develop, test, and scale advanced manufacturing technologies. The facility is incorporating artificial intelligence, robotics, and connected equipment to accelerate the path from research to production.

“The launch of Foundry School recognizes something we have seen here at Georgia Tech for years: Rebuilding American manufacturing requires more than building factories,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. “It requires the talent, technology, research, and industry partnerships to make those factories successful. Georgia Tech is already bringing those pieces together — helping move technologies from the lab toward production while preparing the people who will drive the next generation of American manufacturing.”

The AMPF is part of a broader Georgia Tech ecosystem that connects research and education with industry and workforce partners, including the Technical College System of Georgia. Georgia Tech also has longstanding relationships with nations participating in the State Department’s Pax Silica initiative.

As manufacturing investment grows in Georgia and across the country, Georgia Tech is helping develop the technology, talent, and partnerships needed to support that growth.

Despite decades of research, the chaotic nature of turbulence makes it difficult to predict and control. This challenge impedes more than smoother air travel. Solving the turbulence problem could lead to advances in areas ranging from sustainable energy to training a smarter workforce for the era of artificial intelligence (AI).

To advance understanding of turbulence, the National Science Foundation is establishing a new, $30 million Science and Technology Center (STC) at Michigan State University. Georgia Tech is among eight universities supporting the center.

Assistant Professor Qi Tang will join the STC for Transformative Explorations in Multi-Physics and Engineering of Scientific Turbulence (TEMPEST). TEMPEST, launching on Sept. 1, aims to build trustworthy, predictive models of real-world turbulence. 

Tang will lead TEMPEST’s modeling and scientific machine learning (ML) efforts. NSF will fund Tang and Georgia Tech with over $1 million from the center’s five-year, $30 million award.

By understanding and predicting turbulence, TEMPEST can unlock new applications, with a focus on fusion energy and national security. The center will also generate long-term research projects with applications in air and space flight, manufacturing, chemistry, and broaden science education and AI fluency.

“Turbulence has resisted prediction for a century,” said Tang, a faculty member in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

“STC TEMPEST aims to develop a unified, predictive science that advances fusion energy, improves hypersonic technologies, and deepens our understanding of how stars created the elements that make up our world and ourselves. For everyday people, the center points toward abundant clean energy and faster, more efficient flight."

Turbulence is the motion of a fluid characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and speed. Turbulent flows can occur across all scales, from interactions between subatomic particles to astrophysical scales, including supernovas, black holes, and cosmic rays. 

While turbulent flows are common and occur naturally, scientists still do not fully understand them. Small changes in a turbulent flow can produce dramatically different outcomes. Combined with the countless interactions across multiple scales of time and space, this makes turbulence extraordinarily difficult to predict.

“Rather than studying individual pieces of this enormously complex problem in isolation, we are bringing together theory, experimentation, computation and artificial intelligence to develop a deeper understanding of turbulence across scales,” said Michael Murillo, an MSU professor and the director of TEMPEST. 

“Our goal is not simply to understand turbulence better, but to make it predictable and controllable in ways that will enable new technologies and scientific discoveries.”

The NSF TEMPEST award supports students and researchers at Michigan State University, Auburn University, Baylor University, Georgia Tech, San José State University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, University of Rochester, and Yale University to combine theory, computation, AI techniques, and experimentation to build trustworthy predictive models of real-world turbulence for high-consequence applications.

Additional partners include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Fusion, and General Atomics.

Together, TEMPEST researchers will build more accurate and reliable physics-grounded models. The center will test new ideas against real-world observations, then use those results to refine the models. 

Tang contributes expertise in ML, scientific computing, and plasma physics to STC TEMPEST. 

Earlier this year, Tang received an Early Career Research award from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. He is using the award to build ML and data science tools that help scientists analyze massive datasets from fusion experiments and simulations.

This interdisciplinary approach is intended to move science from understanding why turbulence behaves as it does to predicting how it will behave. Through prediction and simulation, scientists could eventually engineer solutions to control turbulence in real-world scenarios.

The center will make its data and software broadly available and engage the public through museum exhibitions, immersive media, and educational programs that are expected to reach more than 10,000 K-12 students annually. TEMPEST will also help train an AI-fluent scientific workforce prepared to tackle complex problems across disciplines.

“One reason I am excited to work in TEMPEST is because it aligns perfectly with our School of CSE mission. As a discipline, CSE complements theory and experimentation as a mode of scientific discovery,” Tang said. 

“We build computational models to simulate scientific and engineering concepts, like turbulence in this case, so that we can test theories that are too difficult, expensive, or risky for physical experiments.”

Using mathematical formulas, engineering principles, and a curiosity for exploration, a Georgia Tech alumnus is on a path to biking every public street in Los Angeles, covering more than 7,500 miles.  

Georgia Tech rose to No. 3 in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression's (FIRE) 2027 College Free Speech Rankings. 

Maintaining campus buildings often means identifying problems before they become visible. Georgia Tech’s Planning, Design, and Construction department is piloting an innovative building envelope assessment at Lyman Hall that uses drone-mounted infrared technology to detect hidden moisture intrusion and potential building performance issues.  

Walking down the stairs in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, you might look up to discover a set of letters made out of construction paper. Backlit by blue and red light, it reads, “Plant Library: Fridays 3:30 – 4:30”. This sign has caught the eye of many students, who walk inside to discover a bustling scene. Instead of books lining shelves, plants of all sorts are gathered in the windows, drinking in the sunlight. A group of students browses for a few moments before leaving with a plant of their own to nurture. The majority are gathered around a table, cutting up English ivy to propagate in recycled containers.   

Microbes from space have fueled the plots of science fiction mainstays like “Project Hail Mary” and “The Andromeda Strain.” But with more space missions launching each year, finding extraterrestrial life in a microbial form is becoming more plausible. What will the response be back here on Earth if – or when – scientists discover extraterrestrial microbes? Will the international policy and security communities be prepared for the fallout?

When you hear about extraterrestrial life, your mind may go to intelligent life, like the kind present in a lot of Hollywood science fiction. But even the confirmation of microbial life that originated somewhere other than on Earth – which is much more likely – would be a paradigm-shifting event. Thinking about what these consequences might look like early on can help nations and the international community prepare.

Our team is interested in this question. We’re made up of a full professor of international affairs, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry, and whose expertise is on how emerging science and technologies could affect global conflict and cooperation, as well as an emerging scholar in space policy and security and an expert on social and political implications of frontier technologies, such as AI, space, quantum and energy sources.

Multiple Mars landers have identified large amounts of frozen and liquid water, essential for life, on the red planet. Samples retrieved by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft from a near-Earth asteroid revealed the presence of uracil, part of RNA, which is a building block of life. Uncrewed space probes like NASA’s Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer are on their way to conduct detailed reconnaissance of the planet’s moons and to investigate whether they have conditions suitable for life.

Along with data from the James Webb Space Telescope and future missions targeting Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, the likelihood of discovering extraterrestrial microbial life has increased substantially.

A Governance Challenge

The discovery of microbial life would expose significant gaps in international governance related to space.

While there are some existing international agreements, including the Outer Space Treaty, that provide space law guidelines, these are ill-equipped to address the complexities posed by extraterrestrial biology.

The Outer Space Treaty, established in 1967, dictates that countries should use outer space peacefully. It also states that no single nation may claim ownership or exert sovereignty over parts of outer space or celestial bodies such as the Moon.

However, it doesn’t have much to say about who can own extraterrestrial organisms or what to do about biosecurity risks. It doesn’t have direction for who can use, preserve or destroy living things, such as bacteria or fungi, that may be discovered in space.

Historical Analogies and Future Pathways

While people have yet to discover extraterrestrial life of any kind, there are some major geopolitical events that can help researchers understand what the consequences might look like.

While the space race of the 1950s and ’60s led to exploration of the Moon, it was driven by a Cold War power struggle between two nations back on Earth. Instead of coming together to explore space, both countries experienced a renewed sense of nationalism. They used the new discoveries that came from the space race to invest in their military capabilities.

On the other hand, researchers can look at how states respond to asteroid threats. Since an asteroid could pose a truly existential threat from space, preventing the worst-case scenario requires cooperation and thinking ahead.

Astronomers have built a global, collaborative network to monitor for and sound the alarm about any potential threats. This network has shown that nations can put aside terrestrial rivalries to work together if they perceive something from space as a truly existential threat.

The International Space Station is another example showing how nations that are competing great powers on Earth work together to cooperate in space. Countries have collaborated to solve issues on the International Space Station that have specific, short-term and clearly identified goals.

These examples show a range of possible reactions to the discovery of space microbes. The situation could renew space races between competing countries and lead to militarization, or it could create unprecedented cooperation.

Potential Outcomes

We’ve identified three main possible outcomes to the discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life.

First, there’s a cooperative outcome, reminiscent of the asteroid threat network or the International Space Station. Here, nations collaborate to regulate research, share data, protect the planet or advance specific interests they share.

This pathway isn’t inherently benign or malignant. It could entail expanding the roles of international organizations or creating new legal instruments.

Second there’s a competitive outcome, characterized by strategic rivalry between countries. Like in the space race, nations could fight to be technologically superior. They might try to monopolize access to the extraterrestrial microbes or to leverage biological discoveries from the microbes for their own economic or military advantage.

Scientific breakthroughs derived from extraterrestrial organisms could lead to innovations in medicine, agriculture, energy and beyond. However, the organisms could also be weaponized, intentionally or otherwise, which would amplify biosecurity risks. In this sense, the discovery of microbial life could create a new form of technological competition, one that merges space exploration with biological research and development.

The increasing role of private companies, such as SpaceX, complicates this dynamic. These companies receive contracts from the government, blurring the lines between commercial civilian and strategic activities.

For example, around 60% of all satellites currently orbiting the Earth belong to SpaceX’s Starlink subsidiary. The company can – and has – chosen to block access selectively, in alignment with its political priorities. When commercial interests and national priorities diverge, who has access versus who is denied access can be uncertain.

Research around biopiracy may come into play. Biopiracy is a term that applies to two primary issues: the patenting of indigenous knowledge or the patenting of natural resources, such as microbes, for profit. The Budapest Treaty prohibits claiming ownership of a naturally occurring microbe on Earth, but there’s no equivalent for microbes in space.

Third is an isolationist outcome, in which states could sever their involvement in international cooperation due to biosecurity concerns or political distrust. The potential for unknown biological risks, however minimal, could trigger precautionary restrictions on data sharing, which limits international collaboration.

Countries may lose or gain allies as they grapple with whether the microbe could cause harm to humans or the environment, or be developed into a biological weapon.

Emerging technologies will also shape these outcomes. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are already integral to scientific research. Scientists use them to process astronomical data and identify potential biosignatures. Nanotechnology and advances in the life sciences and engineering could allow researchers to study, modify or exploit extraterrestrial microbes, if they’re given access to them.

Countries will have to prepare not only for the scientific implications of discovery but also for its societal and political reverberations. The politicization of scientific discoveries from the microbes could complicate or change how countries respond domestically and at the international scale. Misinformation about the microbes could shape policy and public response.

Preparing for the Unprecedented

The discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life would not merely mark a scientific milestone. It would be a geopolitical event.

Rather than attempting to predict a singular outcome, policymakers could adopt scenario-based planning approaches in the meantime to anticipate and prepare for a range of possibilities. In these approaches, participants explore multiple futures through structured activities similar to professional or military wargaming or path games, in which they explore multiple outcomes systematically to test strategies, to plan and to analyze potential outcomes under realistic uncertainty.

In our view, the question is not whether humanity will discover life beyond Earth, but whether it is prepared for the consequences when it does.

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

As Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera delivered his final Institute Address from the Walter G. Ehmer Theater inside the John Lewis Student Center, he emphasized that the end of his tenure is not the end of a race but rather the next leg of a relay. As he prepares to pass the baton to the next president, he outlined Tech’s unprecedented momentum.  

We encourage everyone to allow extra travel time when moving through these affected areas:

• The Historic Academy of Medicine.
• Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons.
• Price Gilbert Memorial Library.
• Crosland Tower.
• Tech Green.
• Harrison Square.
• Kessler Campanile area.
• Bobby Dodd Way and Cherry Street corridors.

Production activity is expected to take place primarily during the day, starting as early as 7 a.m., and in the early evening hours, with setup, filming, and breakdown occurring throughout the three days. While every effort will be made to minimize disruption, brief holds may be necessary at various times to ensure the safety of the campus community and filming crew.

Campus parking and vehicular traffic may also be affected in select areas due to production vehicle and equipment staging. This includes parking in E84, W21, and limited spaces along Ferst Drive near the John Lewis Student Center. Please follow all posted signage.

We appreciate your patience and cooperation as Georgia Tech hosts this production.

You’ve been planning your dream beach vacation for months, only to arrive and find the shoreline covered in large piles of smelly, brown seaweed, with even more floating offshore. It’s disappointing, for sure – and increasingly common.

Since 2011, summer scenes like this have played out on beaches in South Florida and throughout the Caribbean.

The consequences are even greater for people who live and work along the Caribbean and Gulf coasts and the coasts of the tropical Atlantic. Large masses of sargassum seaweed can clog harbors, interfering with fishing and boating, and in some cases harm marine life. As the seaweed begins to decompose it releases gases, including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and methane, raising concerns for both public health and the environment.

To reduce the impact of these sargassum blooms, a crucial first step is understanding why the seaweed started growing in the first place and what’s sustaining it now.

We study the oceans, marine life, and algae blooms, such as sargassum. Our research suggests that these vast mats of smelly seaweed may have entered a self-sustaining cycle, effectively feeding their own expansion. It’s creating a chronic disaster for the affected coasts, with little sign of ending.

Columbus and the Great Sargasso Sea

Pelagic sargassum is a type of brown seaweed that floats on the ocean surface and is naturally abundant in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the subtropical North Atlantic.

The seaweed takes its name from sargaço, the Portuguese word for grape. When Portuguese navigators reached the region, they noticed its small, grapelike, air-filled bladders that keep the seaweed afloat. Christopher Columbus later wrote about encountering vast mats of it during his voyage to the Americas.

However, in 2011, people began noticing unusually large mats of sargassum in the tropical Atlantic, between the coasts of Africa and Brazil. In the years since, these blooms have become more frequent, lasted longer, and grown much larger, with vast amounts of sargassum washing ashore across Central America, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

In this new area, now called the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, the amount of sargassum surpassed an estimated 37,500 million tons in 2025. Forecasts suggest summer 2026 could break records again.

Sargassum’s Drivers Changed Over Time

For years, scientists have searched for the causes of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.

They explored changes in ocean nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer and other human activities in the Amazon and Congo river basins, increasing amounts of Saharan dust blowing in the wind, and changes in ocean temperatures, winds and currents. None of the hypotheses could fully explain year-to-year variations in the sargassum belt.

Our research suggests something else is also going on – the main cause has changed.

In the winter of 2010, strong winds brought some sargassum southward from the Sargasso Sea to the tropical Atlantic. For a few years, winds stayed strong in winter and spring, acting like a giant spoon and mixing deeper, nutrient-rich water up to the sunlit surface, giving the algae the resources it needed to bloom and grow.

A floating sargassum mat is much more than just seaweed. It is like a floating city, home to fish, shrimp, crabs and countless tiny living organisms, all food for larger fish. Together, they form an ecosystem that we call the sargassumsphere. It’s much like a mobile reef or forest.

These animals collect food around the floating mats and recycle nutrients through their waste and the breakdown of older sargassum. In this way, nutrients are gathered from a much larger area and concentrated around the seaweed, helping the next bloom to grow.

This process can make sargassum blooms very likely to persist in the years ahead.

To test this theory, we created a mathematical model that accounts for the mechanisms controlling the blooms. With the measurements of nitrogen content and isotopic composition in argassum collected around the U.S. Virgin Islands, our model not only reproduced the blooms from 2011 to 2022 but also predicted ahead of time the size and evolution of blooms that occurred in 2023 and 2024, suggesting the theory is correct.

Better Forecasts, Better Solutions

Our work shows that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is likely here to stay.

Predicting when blooms will occur, and understanding what drives them, can help create early warning systems that give coastal communities time to prepare for their unwanted arrival. It can also support long-term efforts to turn sargassum from a costly nuisance into a valuable resource.

Sargassum biomass has attracted growing interest as a renewable feedstock for biofuel production. Unlike bioenergy crops grown on land, sargassum does not need land, freshwater or fertilizers, reducing competition with food production. The seaweed is rich in carbohydrates that can be converted into bioethanol, biogas, bio-oil, or hydrogen through processes such as fermentation, anaerobic digestion, hydrothermal liquefaction and gasification.

Scientists at a university in Barbados, for example, developed a way to produce biofuel from a combination of the excessive sargassum on the island’s shores and wastewater from the local rum industry.

The island is also encouraging farms to use sargassum as a fertilizer and soil amendment, providing a sustainable alternative to synthetic fertilizers. Sargassum is rich in organic matter, potassium, calcium, magnesium and trace elements. After careful processing to remove the salt and excessive metals, it can be used to improve soil structure, enhance water retention and stimulate plant growth.

Sargassum is increasingly also being explored as a sustainable construction material, particularly in Mexico and Brazil. The biomass can be incorporated into building products, such as compressed panels similar to drywall that were developed by researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and low-cost bricks developed by entrepreneur Omar Vázquez Sánchez in Mexico using about 40% sargassum with limestone and other organic materials. Using sargassum as a mortar additive also helps reduce dependence on conventional, carbon-intensive materials.

By learning to live with and make use of sargassum, affected regions may be able to transform a growing challenge into a new opportunity.

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